


Shine

by Zatnikatel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean/Castiel pre-slash, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-05
Updated: 2011-04-05
Packaged: 2017-10-17 15:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 117,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zatnikatel/pseuds/Zatnikatel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It is you, brother. It always was. Remember what I said? You were born to this.”</p><p>Dean is gone, vanished in a flash of light. Castiel is back, with a handprint to match Dean’s and a whispered name on his lips: Michael. And Sam faces losing his brother to an archangel who fell three decades ago, as Team Free Will finds out Dean’s connection to Michael runs deeper than being his vessel, and Dean comes to terms with who he is meant to be and his growing attachment to the angel who gripped him tight and raised him from perdition…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers up to S6; AU after Point of No Return. Includes references to a previous story [Never Come Back] currently only at my LJ, but you don’t have to have read it to read this.
> 
> 10.14.14 – This story is currently being revised and a new version will replace this one in the next couple months.

***

Sam drifts as he drives, because he still can’t believe it, and because he’s scared and it takes him a while to put his finger firmly on what he’s scared of, and then he realizes it’s what he might lose. The feeling of loss, the feeling of staring at his brother for the last time, with the clock ticking, just like New Harmony before Lilith opened the door to her dogs, hits him with the sickly lurch of half-digested food bubbling up into his esophagus. He swallows it back down, wonders if he can pull off the road to throw up surreptitiously without disturbing Dean.

A car looms up out of the dusk, off to the side, the hood up, a couple of figures milling about aimlessly. Kid, one of them, small, preschooler. Woman, her dress billowing in the breeze. It’s getting dark, and the road stretches ahead, flat and deserted. Flat tire maybe, Sam thinks, and his gaze flicks right.

Dean dozes in the shotgun seat, slumped, startles occasionally, makes unintelligible, pained noises that sound uncomfortably like he’s protesting in his sleep. He mutters _Cas_  once or twice, squeaks out a muffled  _Sammy_ , scrabbles restlessly at his thigh with one hand, rouses blearily when Sam pulls off on the verge, and blinks at him for a minute, confused. And then he jolts upright, mouth pulled into a tight, grim line, face still mottled with bruises, eyes flaring with something that looks like panic.

“S’matter? Sam? You bleeding again? Any pain?”

Sam shakes his head, holds up a hand. “I’m fine, Dean, no more blood…” He can still taste copper on his tongue and teeth, and he grimaces. He drifts a hand to rub at his belly, at the memory of gut-stabbing agony, the memory of his brother’s anguish, regret, and soft-voiced acquiescence,  _the answer is yes_ , as Zachariah made him writhe, and choke, and spit his insides all over the floor. Adam too, an innocent in this fubar. He shivers.

“How long was I out?” Dean stretches, groans, winces as he rubs at his ribs.

“Not long,” Sam replies. “Fifteen, tops. You didn’t really sleep, you were… you know. The usual.” He leaves the rest unspoken, but he thinks it.  _Bad dreams_ , his brother’s anxiety and fright expressed in the dark, unconsciously, and sometimes full-blown night terrors. Like it has been on and off since Hell, and all denied and not spoken of the next day.

Dean makes a face, scrubs at his eyes with his knuckles. “We there yet?”

“Nope, Utah,” Sam says, and he frowns. “I think… I’m staying off the highways, just in case. There hasn’t been a road sign in a while.”

“Let me guess. Entering Fudd county, population twelve, including the chickens.” Testy now, the Dean Sam knows and loves. “What then? Piss stop?”

Sam shakes his head, motions back over his shoulder. “Breakdown. Looks like there’s kids in the car.”

Dean snorts. “That’s what they have Triple A for, Sam.”

“It’s up the ass of nowhere, Dean, and getting dark,” Sam says. “Remember that movie where the guy pulls over to help and he’s really a—”

“Jesus,” his brother cuts in waspishly. “Just bring the toolkit. And the Maglite. And if it’s a tire, you’re doing the heavy work.”

***

Station wagon, doors slamming and engine cranking as Dean approaches, a dull grinding whine if he’s ever heard one, and he turns, makes his way back to Sam, just now leaning into the trunk. He reaches in past his brother, stifling a groan of discomfort because he’s fuckin’ worn out, worn down, and Cas really did a number on his ribs, and  _Christ, he doesn’t want to think about Cas_.

There’s a dull beat of pressure across his brow that throbs as he bends forward. His ears are buzzing, and he can see the silver gleam of the angel-killing sword in the trunk, and  _Christ, he doesn’t want to think about Cas_ , where he is, whether he’s hurt, what might be happening to him. Much less think of his brother’s insides hemorrhaging out of his mouth all over the floor while Zachariah worked the room. Make that brothers  _plural_ , and Dean suddenly realizes he can’t picture Adam’s face, can’t really remember what the kid looked like, though he can damn well remember what he sounded like on the other side of the door,  _frantic, desperate_. He forces it out of his mind, because he got the brother of his heart out of that shitstorm, and he would have damn well trampled over Adam to get to Sam if he had to.

“Leave the tools, it’s a jammed starter,” he says curtly, as he pats about the bottom of the trunk. “Baseball bat should do it. Just be a minute.”

Sam nods, calls after him as he makes his way back. “Ask them if there’s a motel in the next ten miles.”

The woman doesn’t see Dean approaching, or maybe she’s trying to pretend it isn’t happening because she saw the movie too. He taps on the window, sees her jump before she looks up. She’s a harassed looking soccer mom in her mid-forties or so, shoulder length brown hair, and it catches in Dean’s throat suddenly,  _Ellen_ ,  _sacrificed_ ,  _wasted_ ,  _because of his fuck-up_. He has to swallow it back as she winds down the window a few inches and stares up at him suspiciously. “Lady, you can keep your doors locked, whatever, but your starter motor’s jammed,” he says tiredly. “I got a baseball bat, just pop the hood again. Good hard knock should loosen it up, get you home.” He can see doubt in her eyes, and he smiles.  “I’m harmless,” he says, and he even forces a wink past the dull pain in his chest that he’s full sure is his ribs and not his regrets, past the anxiety,  _and Christ he doesn’t want to think about Cas_ , buzzing away at the back of his mind and whispering in his ears. “In fact, I’m a servant of Heaven.” It’s Utah, after all.

There’s a toddler screaming in the back, and the teenage girl in the passenger seat is looking up from a pile of papers and a textbook, glowering at Dean, feeding a piece of candy into her mouth and scrunching up the wrapper before she drops it in the footwell on top of a rapidly growing pile of bright cellophane and silver foil. “How do we know you aren’t going to do something to our car that makes it break down again so you can go totally Jason on us out in the sticks?” the girl challenges aggressively.

Dean raises an eyebrow, leans in closer to make himself heard through the gap. “Hate to break it to you, kid, but you’ve already broken down, and we are, in fact, already out in the sticks.” He grins at the woman again, and now she’s stretching down, fumbling for the lever under the dash.

“Fuck it, mom, get a grip,” the girl barks then, and just as suddenly as she exploded, the scrap in the back stops his hollering.

The abrupt silence that descends is somehow weighty, like they’re all poised for something, standing on the edge of the abyss, about to make some significant life-changing decision, and Dean has to shake himself out of the strangeness of it, the sudden tension, the charged atmosphere, like the air is crackling. He shivers involuntarily, leans on the window frame, chooses his words carefully. “Ma’am, I hope I’m not speaking out of line here,” he starts, and then he looks right at the kid. “But you shouldn’t speak to your mom like that. She’s – your mom. Okay? Show her some respect.”

The woman’s features are locked rigid as she stares back. “She has a condition,” she returns, her voice strained and hoarse. “An emotional thing, she’s on medication. We stopped because I needed to change the baby, and I couldn’t start the car again… we’ve been here for a while hoping someone would drive by. She’s just tense. We all are.”

Dean can feel the girl’s eyes boring into him, and somewhere in the back of his mind there’s a familiarity,  _intuition_. He knows this, somehow, recognizes it, but there’s no sense to it, and he needs to break this spell, trance, whatever the fuck it is. He looks back down the endless blacktop. “Quiet road,” he observes, and his voice resounds weirdly loud in his own head. “You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a motel in these parts?”

“In the next town,” the woman says, calmer now. “It’s twenty miles or so.”

Dean nods, finds himself pulled back to the teenager's steady gaze for a long moment before he tears his eyes away. He makes his way around to the front of the car, heaves up the hood, wallops the offending part with the bat. “Turn it over,” he calls out, and the engine roars to life. He clunks the hood down, walks back to the open window, and avoids looking at the kid again. “Easy peasy, lemon squeezey,” he quips weakly. “You got anything you can use to whack it if you have to stop again? Wrench or something?”

The woman nods, pulls something out from under her seat. “I have a claw hammer.” She sees his look, smiles again. “It’s a quiet road.”

Dean huffs out. “Well. Not to sound patronizing, ma’am, but do you know where the starter motor is?” It gets him another nod. “Well, if you need to stop, just clout it once or twice to loosen it up before you crank her again. Otherwise you’ll just drain the battery.” 

The woman smiles, her teeth bright in the gloom, and the tautness in the air snaps, the _wrong_  vibe gone as swiftly as it blew in, so that Dean wonders if he maybe imagined it. Stuck on the road with tired kids, getting dark, hungry, shitty diaper. Bound to make anyone lose it, he muses. He winks, and as he turns to walk back to the car, the teenager snorts.

“Know it all,” she says. “I bet you think you know everything. But maybe you don’t know as much as you thought.”

And there it is again, that weird crackle in the air, and Dean stops and turns back, frowning.

The girl is looking right at him. “Stagflation,” she challenges suddenly, holding up her textbook,  _history_. “Do you know what that is?”

And it turns out he does. “Yep,” he says. “It’s a term used to describe the economy during Nixon’s presidency, because business wasn’t growing and inflation was spiraling out of control.”

***

The nap hasn’t improved Dean’s mood, and neither does a shower. Sam watches as his brother wears a hole in the cheap carpet, wrings his hands, curses the fact they’re right under a flight path, curses the roly-polies infesting the bathroom, curses Utah, curses Brigham Young, curses the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Rocky Mountain elk, the rainbow trout, the Great Salt Lake, the  _fuckin’ Osmonds_. “Except for Crazy Horses,” he rages. “Pretty cool synthesizer riff, I’ll give them that. But only that.” He rubs his brow, leans hard into his hand. “But you know what really fuckin’ grates, Sammy?” he says at the end of his tirade, and his voice cracks. “Touched by a Fuckin’ Angel was filmed here. Right here, in Utah.”

Dean sits down heavily, touches his finger to his split lip, and Sam wonders if he even realizes he’s doing it as he stares into space. “Where’s he been hiding that right hook is what I’d like to know,” he murmurs. “And he kicks like a fuckin’ mule. Jesus.” He transfers his hand to his ribs, presses gently, winces. “I feel weird,” he gripes. “My head’s all fuzzy. It’s whooshing in there.”

Sam frowns. “He was pretty pissed about you using the sigil on him,” he notes after a minute. “Could you manage to land one on him at all? You looked pretty wrecked when he flew you back to Bobby’s. And what do you mean, fuzzy? And whooshing?”

“No, I could not.” Dean sighs, flicks his eyes up to Sam and away again. “Well… what I mean is –  _did_  not. And fuzzy like, I don’t know…  _fuzz_. Whooshing, like – white noise. Or like listening to a seashell.”

Sam snaps his fingers and his brother looks up sharply. “Well, you’re alert,” he offers, and he squints, stares hard. “Your pupils look fine so you aren’t concussed. Could not,  _did_ not?”

Dean throws up his hands. “S’right. Could not. He went totally fifty-one-fifty on me, man. It was pretty unexpected. You don’t expect that kind of beatdown from someone you…” He trails off then, doesn’t look away though.

And Sam knows exactly what his brother means, what he’s referring to, because Dean wasn’t expecting it back then, in the motel in Cold Spring. Sam had overwhelmed him within ten seconds, Ruby’s blood fizzing in his veins and his fists slamming into Dean's jaw brutally hard.

Dean knows Sam knows, his gaze is searching as he continues. “He took me by surprise. But even after he threw the first couple of punches, I just – couldn’t bring myself to hit back. Didn’t want to. Couldn’t – you know.  _Hurt_ him.” He curls his lips up in a wry grin. “Not that I even could. Damn near broke my hand on him before. So.  _Did_  not.” He looks down at his boots. “It’s just, uh… he seemed to take it all really _personally_. And it’s difficult to…” His voice trails off again, and now he teases his split lip with his tongue.

“He was in Hell with you,” Sam ventures. “And you’ve been through a lot together.” And he leaves it there, because he knows that’s all he needs to say and because he doesn’t ever want to have to think about how he put his hands around Dean’s neck so soon after Alastair did, doesn’t want to think about his brother maybe pulling his punches back then too, because Dean didn’t want to hurt him.

Dean’s voice goes soft. “Yeah. He was. And we have.”

The silence is easy, easier than it’s been in months, and after Sam rides along on the crest of it for a few minutes it occurs to him that there’s something he has wanted to ask Dean for a long time and he never has, it never seems like the right moment even though it’s been on the tip of his tongue. Or maybe he’s been afraid his brother will shut down on him, and after what went down with the Siren he wouldn't blame him. But maybe now it is the right time, or a less wrong time, so he throws it out there.

“Do you remember? I mean… remember him being there with you? Saving you?”

Dean looks up, and for maybe a second there’s doubt there, suspicion, a memory of words meant to mock and hurt. It’s there and gone, but even though it’s fleeting Sam is surprised when his brother continues.

“He didn’t just appear wearing the trenchcoat, Sam, if that’s what you mean,” Dean snorts. “It wasn’t like the dreams I had when that nutjob Bender kid popped up in Duluth. It was more like – light. Spinning colors. Feeling like I was safe. Feeling comfort. Hope. Uh… and don’t laugh, but…” His cheeks flush. “Cared for,” he mutters self-consciously. “Feeling like I was cared for. Loved. Which wasn’t exactly the norm down there.”

Sam waits a beat. “I wouldn’t laugh at that, Dean,” he says quietly, regretfully too, because he knows the reason for his brother’s uncertainty.

Dean nods slowly, plays one boot over the top of the other and it’s oddly childlike. He looks up again. “It’s weird, but Adam? He’s blood and all, but this… this is different. Adam might be my half-brother,  _our_  half-brother, but this, Cas, it’s – _more_. Somehow. It just means more. He means more. To me.”

It’s awkward still, and Sam thinks that maybe his brother is waiting for him to shoot it down, maybe expecting a smartass comeback, thinks Dean is but damn well hopes he isn’t. “We never really—” Sam starts, then stops and rephrases. “We _don’t_  really know Adam,” he continues softly, and he knows he doesn’t sound convincing.

Dean pinches the bridge of his nose. “Do you think he’s even alive? Adam, I mean?”

Sam throws out his hands, shakes his head. “Honestly? I don’t think so, Dean. I mean… Zachariah raised him for a reason, to bait a trap, and Adam said the deal was he’d get to see his mom again, and well. I doubt that meant bringing his mom back.”

Dean sniffs. “Yeah, more like sending him back there,” he murmurs. “I wonder if his Heaven is like the Prom this time round too.” He sucks in his lower lip, winces. “I don’t know what to do,” he blurts out then. “I’m officially at a loss. This is all going south faster than a fuckin’ snowbird in Winter. And Cas, he…” He scrubs a frustrated hand through his hair. “I don’t know what to do,” he says again. “I know what I said… about taking the fight to them. But I just don’t know how we can fight them. Especially without Cas.”

“Maybe we don’t stand and fight, Dean,” Sam offers. “Maybe we keep running. We have the sigils, they can’t find us.”

Dean parries, almost aggressive compared to his previous apathy. “Keep running? Hiding? While Lucifer wastes the planet and everyone on it?” His eyes flash. “I saw what he does, Sam, remember? There won’t be anywhere to run… assuming we don’t catch the Croatoan virus, or get picked off by fuglies somewhere along the way.” He buries his head in one hand, works his scalp hard with the tips of his fingers. “We got Adam sucked into this mess,” he mutters. “We need to get him out of it. And I really need to get Cas back. We can’t fight this without his help, and we can’t run from it without him either.”

Sam wants to be positive, ends up hesitating, floundering in his head because he knows it’ll be just so much lip service. “Dean. We’ll get him back,” he echoes his brother’s words in the car instead, and unconvincingly too, as he boots up his laptop. “Adam too, if he’s out there. I promise you. I’m on it right now, Bobby is too.” He pauses then, chews his thumbnail, ends up just firing it out point blank because there really isn’t a diplomatic way of saying it. “You killed Zachariah.”

His brother’s eyes flick up and away almost immediately. He doesn’t reply, but he pouts, and his jaw twitches.

Sam tries again. “Dean. You killed Zachariah. After you said yes. And Cas said that only—”

“It was the plan wasn’t it?” Dean cuts in harshly. “Stick one of those swords in him, distract him so we could get Adam out of there, us too.”

Sam sighs out. “Distract him, yeah. We never expected to kill him.”

“So it was a bonus,” his brother deflects. “I don’t see why it’s even an issue. We needed him out of the picture, he’s gone. That’s good for us.” He rubs his brow. “Anyway. You had an angel machete too. Could just as easily have been you taking him out. I just got there first.”

“But I didn’t take him out, did I?” Sam says pointedly. “So we’ll never know.”

They stare at each other for a minute.

“It’s an issue because you shouldn’t be able to gank an angel,” Sam says then. “Cas said that, and I think Cas is the authority in this case.”

“I was lucky.”

“You shouldn’t be able to gank an angel, Dean,” Sam persists quietly. “Just like you shouldn’t have been able to gank the Whore of Babylon. And you did it after you said yes.”

Dean glances up at him again, and his eyes are guarded, and Sam can see the second when his brother closes it off, shuts it down. “I killed the Whore without saying yes,” he says tightly. “And what I said back there, it was – conditional. Which means I got a do-over. And whatever you’re implying, I’m not in the fuckin’ mood for this.” There’s a barely concealed edge of menace to his voice now, and Sam can see his brother’s right leg start its nervous shimmy. “I’m me,” Dean snaps.

Sam doesn’t press it any more than he has, doesn’t pour out the horror of hearing that one word, of steeling himself to watch his brother consumed by the light, even though he wants to tell Dean, even though he wonders if he could use whatever it is that lurks in him, whatever it is that makes him able to twist and push and force, to make Dean do his bidding, like that one time in Duluth. Use it to make him promise.

He swallows it down, his fear and dread that his brother might somehow not be himself, might have  _turned_. And suddenly the revelation hits him: this is how Dean felt in Rochester when he juiced up and ripped Famine’s black, smoky guts out while he tasted his own blood on his lips. “I’m not implying anything,” he manages finally, comforts himself with the thought that his brother’s baleful stare and snarled out hissy fit are characteristically, uniquely, Dean.

He turns back to the laptop, taps at the keyboard, and up it flashes on the screen: the symbol they last saw the angel carving on his chest with the box cutter. And Sam remembers how rivulets of blood trickled down Castiel’s skin, shivers at the memory, because the thought that Castiel might be mortal, might be getting weaker, might be _vulnerable_ , makes him feel sick, because even if he feels like he might finally be getting back on an even keel with his brother he still thinks the angel might be the only thing who can really protect Dean from Michael. And maybe from him too.

“Are you okay, anyway?” he says, into a silence that’s suddenly, awkwardly, reminiscent of the last few weeks. “Not just the fuzzy head. Your ribs, I mean.”

Dean sniffs, rolls his shoulders, and suddenly the atmosphere is looser again. “I’ll live. Fact, they’re feeling better already.” He throws Sam a look, quizzical. “That car, the breakdown,” he ventures. “Did you get a vibe from it?”

It’s almost a relief, the change of topic safer territory. “A vibe?” Sam parrots. “Can you be more specific?”

Dean shrugs. “No, not really. Just got a funny feeling from the kid.”

Sam picks through his recent memories, pulls out the image of a three-foot high shortass waving his arms as he drove by. “The toddler?” He grimaces at the prospect of this potential new low. “Possessed toddler?”

“Nah. Older kid, girl. Teen,” his brother replies. “In the car, stuffing herself with candy and bitching at her mom.” He air quotes. “Her mom said she had a  _condition_ …” He whistles, twirls his finger up at his temple. “Looney tunes, I’m guessing.” And then his stocky frame shakes suddenly, a tremor that comes from nowhere. “Man, what is it with teenage girls?” he murmurs. “Bride of Chucky, all of them.” He huffs out, his voice sharper now. “I don’t know… she was just – creepy. Gave off this…  _aura_. Like Carrie at the Prom. Mouthy too, told me I was a know-all and then said maybe I didn’t know as much as I thought.” He laughs, but it’s hollow. “Made me feel like the brains of the family there for a minute.”

He twitches some more, scowls, taps his hands on his thighs, reaches into his jacket pocket for the car keys. “I need a drink,” he declares, and he holds up a warning finger. “Don’t say a fuckin’ word. I need one. Heck, I need many.” He pushes up, starts for the door, stops and peers over Sam’s shoulder at the screen, squints. “What is that?”

Sam shrugs. “Enochian. Bobby’s trying to translate some more of the symbols on your X-ray, he reckons it’ll help him do some codebreaking, maybe work out what the sigil means, where Cas might have beamed to.”

“If it’s even in this dimension,” Dean mutters. “We should have thought to ask him where the outfield is. He could be, I don’t know – floating around the crab fuckin’ nebula.”

Sam glances up over his shoulder, sees a glazed, faraway expression in Dean’s eyes again. “Well, wherever he is, you think those other angels blasted there with him?” he says uncertainly. “Only he didn’t have his sword.”

Dean doesn’t react, just stares at the computer, and then he frowns. “That’s wrong,” he says, and he leans over and stabs at the screen with a finger. “It should be two syllables.”

Sam glances at the symbols, the translation underneath, looks back up at his brother, feels his brow furrow in doubt. “Uh. Two syllables? I’m sure Bobby probably—”

“It’s wrong. The base syllables in Enochian are C, V, CV, or VC. There aren’t any CC syllables,” his brother announces. “If a CC sequence occurs in a word without any vowels clearly attached to either, it should be two syllables. Same with VV sequences. Two syllables. Every time. Don’t forget this is magic with a k at the end, Sammy, you need to think outside the box.” He twists, throws up the car keys, snatches them out of the air as he strides to the door. “Beer run. Back in ten.”

He’s whistling as he leaves, jaunty even. And Sam stares at the closed door for about thirty seconds, then fumbles for his cell, drums his fingers impatiently on the tabletop as he waits. “Bobby? Yeah – uh, no. It’s not, actually. Look, don’t panic. But I think something’s off with Dean.”

He flinches at the tirade that batters his ear, waits for a break in the rant. “I know, I know I said… Look. I lied, okay? He did say yes.”

Dead silence now at the other end, before he hears a choked-out gasp.

“No, Bobby, wait a minute, wait a minute,” he dashes out. “Nothing happened. Well – not that I could see…” He stops again, tries to keep up with the babble. “No… look, stop for a second, will you?” he cuts in shrilly. “He seems himself. Sort of.  _No!_  He is himself, definitely. It’s just that he can read Enochian.”

***

Dean pulls into the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven, creaks open the door, finds he’s singing to himself as he saunters towards the store, finds for some reason he can’t finger that he feels okay with life. And then suddenly he’s dizzy, and there’s that whooshing in his head again, like the waves crashing in a seashell, static, white noise, sibilant whispering, like distant voices. He reels, finds he’s looking up at the sky, and it’s endless, mysterious, purple black, clouds like the softest pale pink cotton candy, and he imagines himself buffeted about up there, floating, gossamer light, a feather carried on the breeze. And then he comes back to himself abruptly, gazes wildly around him, disoriented, does a one-eighty that has him looking back in the direction he came, at a bunch of assorted cars and trucks he doesn’t recognize.

He fumbles in his pocket, pulls out his cell, speed dials. _Voicemail, damn_. “Hey. S’me. You need to fix that message, man. It still sucks ass.” He half turns, looks towards the lights. “I’m at a Seven-Eleven somewhere in Utah… Heber, I think. I’m – something’s wrong. Something happened… I think I’m lost. Sort of. I dunno. And I feel like someone’s watching me. Just – get here when you can. Hey? You there?  _Hello?_ ”

He snaps his cell closed, chews his lip for a second, flinches because it damn well hurts there, it’s split, and for the life of him he can’t remember why, or how it even happened. He stares down at the phone, flips it open again,  _names, just names_ , taps number two. “Uh… Yeah. Sam? Is it? Uh… Seven-Eleven. No, sidetracked. Fine, why?”

The voice on the other end jabbers tinnily at Dean for a few minutes, and in his memory he’s wading through thigh-deep mud that sucks at his boots, wading towards something, anything that might tell him who the fuck Sam is because he can’t honestly remember,  _wait a second_ , hunter, friend, enemy, son, brother. _Brother_. Oh yeah.

The voice pauses.

“I am,” Dean replies now he has the chance to get a word in. “Well. I would, if I could just… look, this is gonna sound – what kind of car do I drive? Yeah, you heard me right. I just can’t, I mean – I’m standing here lookin’ at a whole bunch of cars, and I can’t remember which one is mine. Impala? Okey doke. Yeah. No. S’ fine, calm down. Yeah, I’ll be careful. Did I hit my head, then?”

He runs his fingers across his skull, doesn’t feel any sore spots, it’s all at the front, his lip, his nose, his ribs,  _he kicks like a fuckin’ mule_. Or it was, because now he’s rubbing at his face it isn’t hurting at all, and he must have imagined his split lip because that doesn’t smart like it did either, and he’s sucking in deep lungfuls of oxygen without any tightness or pain. “Wait a minute, where am I coming back to? Oh… yeah.” He reaches into his back pocket, pulls out the room key, squints at the fob. “Got it. Fifteen or so.”

As he slides his phone back in his jacket pocket, Dean considers for a minute, walks back to the car and roots a pen out of the glovebox, writes the word Impala on the palm of his left hand just in case. The whispering in his head is getting louder and he flashes to the head shrink he conjured up from his own battered imagination. He scowls. “Fuck that.” And he ponders it, thinks maybe it isn’t really whispering, maybe it’s more like the wind blowing through the trees, or through fields of corn, more like a rustling, like those stupid home-made maracas he made out of plastic soda bottles and Lucky Charms for his brother a lifetime ago, after they caught The Mambo Kings one Saturday afternoon in some crappy motel room in Scrote, Indiana. “It’s the wind,” he says to his baby. “The wind in the trees. Whispering pines. That’s what it is. Not voices.”

He looks up, around him, shivers because he can’t shake the feeling something’s watching him. He presses his palm against his ribs, the sigil, tracks his hand up to his shoulder to rest it on the other mark for a second. And he suddenly feels at ease, content, fulfilled, finds he’s singing softly to himself as he starts walking towards the lit up storefront again. “I can feel you standing there, but I don’t see you anywhere…”

***

An hour later Sam is pacing, calling his brother for the fourth time, muttering oaths as he’s diverted to voicemail again. He has half an eye on the television, isn’t really paying attention, and the words  _breaking news_  are flashing on the screen and a rumpled looking cub reporter is yammering into a microphone.

And there in the background he can see the sleek black rump of his brother’s baby, police cars winking at her. His hand drops to his side as he takes it in,  _attempted robbery… Seven-Eleven… hostage situation…_  and it cuts to footage of a figure in a Kevlar vest, shot from a distance. The man is walking towards a brightly lit building, hands up, and now he’s placing his gun on the ground, and he keeps walking right up to the door. Sam would recognize those bowed legs anywhere, and he gapes, mouth slack, as Dean disappears inside the store, and then it’s back to the talking head,  _huge coincidence… one of the FBI’s top negotiators driving through… lives on the line… extraordinary scenes here…_

It’s all over by the time the stolen Camry skids into the parking lot, and Sam wriggles his way through a modest crowd of onlookers to the police cordon. He can just make out his brother ten yards or so away, talking animatedly to a small platoon of reporters, lights flashing, cameras jostling for space, a modest cluster of attentive five-O huddled in back of him, hanging on every word.

He nudges a middle-aged man next to him. “What happened?”

The guy shakes his head. “Shoulda been here kid,” he enthuses. “Hold up at the Seven-Eleven.” It’s said with due weight and gravity, like he’s talking about the Gunfight at the OK Corral, and he gestures over at the camera crews. “Local pothead ran wild with a thirty-thirty, took a whole bunch of people hostage. Top FBI negotiator driving through talked him down, got them all out. It was pretty amazing. I saw it all go down.”

Sam blinks at him. “Top FBI negotiator?” he echoes.

The man nods, leans in confidentially. “He’s a real good-lookin’ kid. Real –  _pretty_. Sorta…  _glows_.”

The guy is wearing mascara, Sam could swear to it, and he pulls what his brother calls bitchface #six, jogs back to the car he liberated from the motel parking lot, twirls the dial rapidly through static and the requisite country music. And there it is, Dean’s voice crackling over the airways,  _coming to you live from Heber, Utah, on KPCW, your community connection_ , and he freezes, can actually feel drool starting to pool on his tongue and threaten to drip out his mouth as his brother holds court.

“Ma’am, a hostage situation is a law enforcement worst case scenario,” Dean is declaring confidently. “It puts innocent civilians at risk, but we cannot intervene with prejudice in case hostages are harmed by the perpetrators or by stray bullets. That makes the negotiation the most important aspect of any siege of this kind… I had to work to find out what the hostage-taker wanted and how we could solve this crisis without any bloodshed, while also ensuring the safety of the hostages.”

_And you did this at some risk to yourself?_  Woman’s voice, breathless, and Sam can just picture her eating his brother up with her eyes. When Dean replies his voice is honeyed, chocolate brown, topped off with a rasp that sends a thrill racing up and down Sam’s own spine as his brother hooks up for the night on national public radio.

“Yes… miss? Is it? Uh-huh, good… Karen? Well, Karen, hostage-takers can be pretty angry and volatile… there’s a lot of adrenaline flowing and that isn’t good for their captives. Part of my job is to reason with them… never to argue. It involves using delaying tactics, and keeping a positive, upbeat attitude. I had to keep reassuring the perpetrator that this situation could end peaceably, while I chipped away at him in order to downgrade his demands and weaken his position until he—”

_Fuck it_. Sam snaps off the radio, scratches his head, fumbles for his cellphone again. “Something’s definitely off with him,” he barks into the receiver.

***

She turns about a yard away, steps back, reaches around and pushes something into his hip pocket. “My card,” she murmurs, so close up Dean can smell the scent of Colgate on her breath. “I’d appreciate an exclusive, Agent Michaels. I’ll be getting off in an hour.”

Her lips are so close to Dean’s that he feels his own tingle. “I concur, Karen,” he growls, in his  _Dean Winchester like the fuckin’ rifle_  voice. “I can offer you all rights… and I can personally guarantee that you’ll be getting off in an hour.”

She smiles, licks her lips so her tongue just ghosts Dean’s, steps back and drifts into the darkness. Dean laughs out loud, spins on his heel and strolls back across to his,  _glances at his palm_ , Impala, only notices the gigantic figure in the passenger seat when he’s got his ass planted on the leather himself.

There’s a split second of silence, and then, “Jesus fucking Christ, Dean!” the other man snaps roughly, and he’s running his hand through long hair that damn well needs cutting.

Dean has to think through it all again for a second: hunter, friend, enemy, son, brother,  _Sam_. “Lord’s fuckin’ name, Sam,” he admonishes testily in return. “What’s your point?”

The guy, his brother, makes a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp. “What the fuck, Dean?” he sputters. “ _Hostage negotiation?_ You could have gotten those people killed… you could have been killed yourself… Not that Michael wouldn’t bring you back, but even so.” The guy,  _his brother_ , Dean reminds himself, stares hard for a second, like he’s trying to figure something out, shakes his head as he repeats, “What the fuck, Dean?”

Dean stares back, furrows his brow, and something clicks in his head, so loudly he’s sure he hears it resound through the small space between them. And suddenly it’s blank inside his brain, and tumbleweeds are blowing about in there, wafting in the dry desert breeze, and he can’t remember what the hell his brother’s beef is this time. “Hostage negotiation?” he bleats. “What the fuck? As in, what the fuck is this about? Sam?”

Sam saws the air with his hands, and his eyes are huge, frustrated. “Hostage negotiation, Dean! Agent Michaels! One of the FBI’s top hostage negotiators, who just happened to be passing through this backwoods hole in the ground? Are you fucking _insane?_ ”

Dean frowns, thinks about it for a second. “It would seem so,” he offers diplomatically. “Since I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

Sam flaps his lips. “You. What. You don’t. Can’t. You. What are you. What. The  _fuck?_  Dean?” He palms his face for a second, takes a few deep breaths. “Something’s wrong,” he mutters. “I knew it.”

Dean leans back into the seat, rubs at his chin as he feels a sudden surge of something inside, some feeling he doesn’t quite recognize. “Damn right something’s wrong,” he snaps. “You got a vivid imagination, Sam. You been… you know? Sampling the local black-eyed peas or something? Sucking on things you shouldn’t?” He doesn’t know where the sneer comes from, but it’s a fuckin’ swashbuckling, sword-swinging, mustache-twirling, peg-legged pirate of a sneer, with a parrot squawking on its shoulder.

Sam’s hand drops away from his face, and he looks crestfallen. “Why would you say that, Dean?” he says softly.

Dean snorts, shrugs. “Maybe I’m just petty,” he drawls. “Maybe it’s just getting to me, all those times that bitch climbed in the cockpit, and took out her sticker, and sliced into her arm, and little Sammy latched on and nursed like a baby while she patted his hair and told him that if he drank enough of her he could get his brother out of the Pit. And he fuckin’ believed her lies, and…” He doesn't complete the sentence, because there’s a sharp needle of pain in Dean’s temple and he reaches up a hand, massages the spot hard.

“How would you know that, Dean?” Sam is saying, gasping really, and when Dean glances across at Sam his brother is slack-jawed.

“I know everything,” Dean mutters, and he rubs at that sharp, strobing pain again, tries to rub it away. “I know it all, things you don’t even…” And there it is again, that blankness in his head. He stares back at Sam, and his brother is pasty faced now, looks ill. Dean’s heart burns rubber as it skids to a stop. “Know what?” he says, panicked. “Know what, Sam? You okay? Only you look like you’re –  _not_ … Are you sick? Are you bleeding again?”

Sam cocks his head and his eyebrows meet in the middle. “No,” he says, slowly. “I’m not sick, Dean. I’m not bleeding.” His voice is ragged as he continues. “Know _that_. How would you know  _that_ , about Ruby, what she said, how it all started… how would you know she told me that? So I’d do it?”

Dean tilts his own head, wrinkles his nose in distaste, because hearing her name still has his gut twist uncomfortably inside him, still has him pissed to the gunwhales that his brother set him lower on the totem than his tame demon.  _Look where it got us_ , he gripes viciously inside his head. “What are you talking about?” he snaps with his outside voice. “Know what? Do what? What about Ruby? If I ever hear her name again it’ll be too soon.” He peers out the windshield into the dark, cranes his neck to look out back. Bright lights, Seven-Eleven,  _cops_. “Where the fuck are we anyway? What’s with the five-O? Jesus, no wonder I feel like I’m being watched. My head. Fuzzy. You sure you aren’t bleeding?”

“Utah,” Sam says faintly. “Just outside Heber. The cops aren’t here for us. We’re on the way back to Bobby’s… and yes, I’m sure.”

Bobby’s, and Dean has to think about it, finally retrieves the image of a guy a few years older than him, dark hair, blue, _blue_ eyes burning into him, mournful expression all the damn time. “Trenchcoat dude,” he says. “Tax accountant. Bobby. He does our taxes. Is it tax season?”

Sam leans across, very deliberately plucks the car keys from Dean’s hand. “I’m driving,” he says firmly. “We’re going to pick our stuff up at the motel and get back on the road to Bobby’s.”

Dean doesn’t argue, shuffles his ass over into the vacated space, and the door slams shut as Sam gets in behind the wheel. “My head feels weird, Sam,” he says, and he presses the heel of his hand to his temple. “Spaced out. Fuzzy. Whispering pines. That guy in the trenchcoat isn’t Bobby is he? He’s… he’s important. To me. But I can’t remember who he is except that he sells ad space. And we don’t do tax.”

Sam slants his eyes over and he nods just barely. “We don’t do tax, Dean,” he says. “And it’s Castiel.”

Dean closes his eyes for a second, thinks,  _hunter, friend, enemy, brother. Brother._ Oh yeah.

“He’s important, Dean,” Sam continues gently, carefully even. “He’s real important to you. But don’t worry. You’ll remember who he is… we’ll fix this, I promise.”

***

Dean is clutching at straws himself by the time they get back to the motel room. “It was that movie,” he suggests. “You know… the one about the bank job. Inside Man, that’s it. That’s where I got the spiel from. And the whispering’s stopped. I’m fine.”

His brother is grabbing handfuls of fabric, ramming it into the two duffels, pauses mid-stuff. “So it was whispering pines meaning rustling? Not the song? And you’re saying you learned how to be a hostage negotiator from watching a Denzel Washington movie?”

It’s suitably withering, and Dean laughs weakly. “Either that or I know everything all of a sudden.”

Sam raises a skeptical eyebrow as he feeds more clothing in the bag. “That’s what you said in the car. And you knew about Ruby. But you didn’t know who Bobby is. Or Cas.”

“I –  _forgot?_ ” Dean offers. He bites on his split lip again, flinches reflexively even though it doesn’t hurt any more. “You should roll that stuff up,” he deflects, and his brother freezes, glowers at him. “It’s how you’re supposed to pack,” he continues timidly. “It takes up less space and it doesn’t crease so much.”

Sam stares at him for a minute. “Since when were you the authority on packing, Dean?” he challenges.

Dean scrunches up his nose. “Uh. I don’t know?”

Sam sits on the bed, tweaks at his chin, narrows his eyes at him. “How do you kill a wendigo?” he asks suddenly.

Dean eyes him back. “Uh. You lost me, dude. What’s a wendigo?”

Sam watches him some more, speculatively.

“You’re watching me,” Dean accuses. “Speculating, contemplating, meditating, ruminating, hypothesizing—”

Sam’s eyes widen. “Try this one,” he cuts in. “How do nuclear weapons work?”

Dean makes a clucking noise with his tongue. “They release huge amounts of energy from the nuclei of atoms either by fission or fusion,” he trots out automatically. “With fission, the nucleus of an atom is split into two smaller fragments with a neutron. You need to use uranium or plutonium if you do it that way. With fusion, you join two smaller atoms, usually hydrogen or helium, to make a big one.”

Sam goggles, and Dean shrugs. “That’s how the sun produces energy,” he finishes off faintly. “Fusion. Anyhoo, either way you do it you end up with a shitload of heat energy and radiation.”

“Corinthians thirteen,” Sam throws out.

Dean doesn’t miss a beat. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” he recites. “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face… now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” 

Sam swallows hard. “Okay. Now, how do you kill a vampire?”

Snorting, Dean responds, “Come on, vampires aren’t real. And everyone knows Corinthians.”

“Not you, Dean,” his brother parries sarcastically.

For a second Dean is taken aback, maybe even hurt, definitely pissed, so he doesn’t mince words. “Are you saying I’m stupid, or something?” he challenges. “Because, you know, stupid is as stupid  _does_ , Sam.” He knows it doesn’t take two years at Stanford to work out what he’s talking about, and he sees his brother put two and two together right the fuck then, sees Sam’s eyes widen and his nostrils flare.

Sam flushes, and his eyes dart away. “No,” he says, and he puts up a hand, placating. “No, Dean – I’m not.” He looks Dean in the eye again. “I know you aren’t stupid Dean,” he says, firmer now. “Believe me, I know.”

Sam’s eyes are open and honest, and somewhere deep down inside it’s a comfort, makes Dean feel warm, content, makes him feel like things can be like they were, and the strained awkwardness dissipates. 

“Look,” Sam continues. “A lot’s happened, Dean, and we’re both wiped. The room’s paid for. Maybe we should get on the road in the morning, pick this up again after a night’s—”

“I’m not tired,” Dean declares. As he says the words he can see Sam doing the math: he’s been awake for eighteen hours straight, bar dozing in the car. “I feel fine,” he insists. “Tan, rested and ready.” And it’s damn well true. “Ask me another,” he smirks. “I feel lucky.”

Sam thinks on it for a minute, raises an eyebrow. “Okay. Tell me something interesting about Europe.”

“Much of modern western civilization is based on the events that took place in Europe,” Dean fires back. “Significant events include the establishment and influence of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, the plague, constant wars between France and England, the Reformation, the colonization of much of the known world by European powers, the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars—”

“Say something in…  _German_ ,” Sam races out, with something like desperation.

Dean nods, tents his eyebrows. “In German,” he emphasizes. “Okay. Ich bin nicht ein fasan plucker, ich bin ein fasan plucker sohn… Ich bin nur fasane rupfen ’bis der fasan plucker kommt.” He smirks as his brother gapes at him, waits a beat before he sing-songs, “I’m not the pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s son, and I’m—”

Sam shoots to his feet, hefts the duffels. “We’re leaving,” he barks. “This – it’s. It isn’t right. We’re going to Bobby’s. _Now_.”

“Wow,” Dean says weakly. “Sammy, you make me go all tingly when you—”

“You, in front.” His brother motions to the door. “Where I can keep an eye on you.”

Dean doesn’t argue. He isn’t sleepy, he feels oddly restless, wants to be on the road, on the move, and it’s ringing in his head, he has an appointment, someone he’s supposed to be meeting, something he needs to do. So he does as he’s told, tools out of the room, through the ill-lit parking lot and up the sidewalk, hands stuffed in his pockets. He shuffles into the office, leans on the counter while his brother slams his hand down on the bell, and idly watches the old timer who’s manning the joint stick his head around the door of the back office before creaking out towards them, leaning heavily on one of those fancy canes with four little feet at the end.

“It’s two in the fuckin’ mornin’,” the man growls. 

“We’re checking out,” Sam snaps, tapping the key furiously on the countertop. “Emergency. Can we get the security deposit back?”

The old guy mutters darkly about needing to check they haven’t trashed the room, while he rummages about and finally produces a lock box from under the counter.

Dean gestures at the man’s cane. “Osteoarthritis, buddy? In your hip there?”

The old man nods, spits tobacco on the floor. “It’s fuckin’ killin’ me, son,” he wheezes. “Meds they hand out are fuckin’ useless.” He starts laboriously counting out dollar bills and quarters, and the  _tap, tap, tap_  of the room key on the counter speeds up to frenzied.

Dean shoots his brother a scorching look that Sam steadfastly ignores, turns back, nods sympathetically. “You ever thought of joint replacement?” he says. “Only you can have that done right up into your eighties these days, as long as you’re in good health. They do over two-hundred thousand of those babies every year. In fact, seniors who get it done are twice as likely as those who don’t to show improvements in physical functioning and increased ability to care for themselves, according to studies.”

The old man pauses in his counting, cocks his head thoughtfully. “You don’t say, sonny?”

“I do say,” Dean confirms, and he winks, taps his chest. “Board-certified orthopedic surgeon. We can just scrape that diseased bone out of your hip and cement a little metal cup socket there, and then we take off the top of your femur, hollow out a little channel into the bone and sink a stem with a brand new ball joint on the end right in there.” He makes a fist with his right hand, smacks it into the curled palm of his left. “Fits together just like that.” He nods for emphasis, finds himself lacing his fingers, stretching them till his knuckles pop, rubbing his palms together. “Or better yet, why don’t you just drop your pants and I’ll take a look, see if I can—”

“Thanks!” Sam yelps. “Keep the rest!” He reaches out and claws at the notes, sends stacks of coins skittering across the peeling formica, before he grabs Dean under the arm and steers him over towards the door.

“But I was just—”

“We’re leaving!”

Dean cranes his head as Sam kicks the door open. “If you go for joint replacement you need metal on metal!” he hollers back. “Don’t get ceramic on ceramic! They squeak, you can hear it from outside, there’s even lawsuits about it…”

Sam manhandles him into the car, flings himself in, screeches them out of the parking lot and up the highway.

“I could have fixed that guy, you know,” Dean says balefully. “I could have had him pain free and walking again if you would have just let me—”

“No,” his brother cries, so high-pitched it almost comes out as a shriek. “Enough, Dean. First you’re an FBI hostage negotiator, and now you’re a board-certified orthopedic surgeon? You get a straight A in nuclear physics and you can speak German, but you’ve forgotten what a wendigo is? What the fuck is going on with you?”

And Dean gets that feeling again, a strange snaky coldness coiling itself around his brain.  _Whispering pines_. “Chillax, Samantha,” he sneers. “If your panties bunch any tighter, you’ll be draining me and hiding my body in the trunk like you did with that nurse.”

The tires squeal and Dean has to brace himself, hands on the dash and elbows locked, as the car fishtails and comes to a messy, dust-clouded halt at a right angle to the deserted road. He glances across, and Sam isn’t looking at him. He’s hunched over, hair hanging down and hiding his face, his knuckles stark white as he clutches the steering wheel, and he makes a low, choked sound.

Dean leans across, pokes him. “You know, the nurse,” he hisses. “The one you drank so you could raise the devil. Cindy, or whatever her name was.”

And then Sam is gone, almost falling out of the car onto the grass, scrabbling away on his hands and knees, and Dean hears the sound of retching from somewhere in the dark. And he smiles, considers all that he has made, and thinks that it is good.

***

There isn’t much to bring up, and Sam spits oily saliva into the dirt, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, tenses as he hears footfalls approach from behind. He almost jumps out of his skin as the hand starts rubbing his back.

“Fuck’s sake Sammy,” his brother is husking out above him. “You should have said if your guts were still bothering you. You aren’t bleeding again, are you?”

Sam holds himself taut, ready. “No,” he mutters. “No bleeding, Dean… it’s fine. Just. All catching up to me, I think.”

Dean huffs out a sigh in response, plants his ass down on the dirt next to Sam, and hugs his knees. “Christ, Sammy,” he says softly. “I don’t know what to do. I’m officially at a loss. This is all going south faster than a fuckin’ snowbird in Winter, and Cas was… he…”

Sam eases himself up slowly, cautiously.

“I don’t know what to do, Sammy,” Dean says again, and he rests his brow on top of his knees. “Where are we, anyway?”

Sam pushes up onto his feet. “Utah,” he says flatly. “Just outside of Heber.”

And then he brings the barrel of his Taurus crashing down on the back of his brother’s skull.

***

Sam rolls his brother’s limp body over, stares down at Dean’s face. It’s peaceful in repose, and something about it is different, gives Sam the same feeling he got when he was staring at Dean in the car outside the Seven-Eleven, trying to work out what had changed. And it suddenly hits him that the bluish-gray shadows under Dean’s eyes, the bruises, the grazes, the split lip, are gone, and his brother’s skin is its usual unblemished freckle-smattered self. “Healed,” Sam breathes. He remembers what the old guy outside the store in Heber said, and applies a more critical eye, but decides he can’t tell if Dean is glowing or not and wouldn’t ever admit it anyway even if he was.

His anxiety noogies his head from the inside out, rubbing its knuckle hard against the bone as Sam drags his brother’s limp deadweight up onto the back seat of the Impala and cuffs him to the door handle, before shooting him with enough methohexital to ensure he sleeps like a baby all the way to South Dakota. He floors it all the way to I-80, and just outside of Evanston, roughly eight hours before he’s expecting his brother to come round, Sam glances into the rearview mirror to see Dean glowering back at him, mouth pulled thin with anger.

“When did you get in him?” Dean spits out venomously.

Sam skates across three lanes on two wheels, the car pirouetting and narrowly missing a semi-truck en-route as he hauls on the steering wheel. He can see the trucker’s mate gesturing wildly, see the whites of his eyes and hear him hollering abuse, as he slams his boot down on the brakes and simultaneously goes for the knife that can kill anything. A split-second after he first registered Dean’s glare, Sam has them parked haphazardly on the verge, his back pressed up against the window, the knife poised to strike, defensive, fuck,  _offensive_ , because his brother is dangerous enough when he’s human to convince Sam the demon version will be a death-dealing monster.  _He was when he was in the Pit_ , he thinks suddenly.

“When did you get in him?” Dean snarls again, and Sam notices abstractly that his brother is mirroring his own reaction, shrinking away from him and pressing himself as far as he can into the upholstery.

Sam breathes in deep and hard, ratchets it down a notch. “When did  _you_  get in  _him?_ ” he croaks thickly.

“Don’t fuck with me, buddy,” Dean seethes. “Whatever you do, don’t fuck with me, because you do not have the juice… I can smell you in there. When did you get in him?”

Sam thinks on his feet, starts jabbering it out fast and sure, “Vade, Satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis, humiliare sub potenti…” 

And nothing is happening, no twitching, no belching smoke, and his brother is leaning forward slightly, quizzical, maybe even amused, and now he’s speaking himself, firm and steady, “Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur…” And Dean gets progressively quieter, his voice falters and trails off, and now he looks puzzled. “Why isn’t it working?” he snaps abruptly. “I can smell you in him. Why isn’t it working?”

Sam goggles at him. “Well, mine’s not working either,” he says defensively, feeling damned foolish as he does.

“You shouldn’t be able to say the exorcism rite if you’re a demon,” his brother challenges.

Sam reaches up to his shirt collar, pulls it down. “I still have the tatt. I’m not possessed. And you shouldn’t be able to say the rite of Saint Michael if  _you’re_  a demon.”

And Dean heaves out a sigh, pulls his own tee down. “Ditto.” He raises an eyebrow. “You think I’m a demon,” he says. “I assume that’s why I was cuffed?”

Sam scrunches his face up, relaxes slightly until what his brother just said registers. “What do you mean,  _was?_ ” he ventures, and his hackles rise up again, along with the knife.

Dean snorts, holds up his hands in the darkness, wiggles his fingers. “Fuckin’ amateur. You know the cuffs haven’t been made that can hold me.” He belly-surfs gracefully over the back of the shotgun seat, arranges himself more comfortably, shoots Sam a sideways glance that tracks down to the blade. “Are you going to put that thing away?”

Sam doesn’t. “I cuffed both hands, Dean,” he says meaningfully. “I lifted all your lockpicks too. And you shouldn’t even be conscious right now.”

Dean leans forward slightly. “Holy water,” he snaps, gesturing with a hand. “Come on. I know you got some. Give it here.”

Sam roots out his flask, hands it over, watches as his brother downs a couple of gulps and wipes his mouth.

“I’m me,” Dean announces as he hands it back. “Your turn.”

Sam considers, takes a swig. “You better not be a fucking siren,” he breathes, as he stows the flask back in the door pocket. “And this doesn’t change the fact that I cuffed both hands and shot you full of happy juice.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Oy.” He rubs at his jaw for a minute, visibly relaxes, slumping back against the seat. “What the hell is going on with you, Sam?” he says finally. “You stink of sulfur.”

It hits Sam in his gut as hard and relentlessly as his brother’s fists ever have, sucks the wind out of him, has his chest squeezing tight with disappointment. “Going on with  _me?_ ” he manages, and he tries to make himself think of something else, anything else but his taint, his sin, his weakness and his craving. “Dean, for crying out loud,” he fumbles out. “You’re – all over the place. You’re forgetting things you’ve known for years, you know things you’ve never known… you told some old guy at the motel you were a hip surgeon, and I honestly think that if I hadn’t been there you might have operated. You called me from the Seven-Eleven and I’m sure you didn’t even know who I was… you negotiated seven hostages out of a hold up while you were on a beer run, and you mixed up Cas and Bobby. Jesus. You even thought we paid taxes.”

Dean is staring owlishly at him, sucking his bottom lip in like he always does when he’s thinking. “You still smell like the Pit,” he declares suspiciously after a minute. “And I have no memory of any of that other stuff.”

Sam runs a hand through his hair, gropes for words. “You never said you could smell sulfur on me before, Dean,” he says softly. “And you said things,  _knew_  things… things you couldn’t possibly know. About me. And Ruby.” He takes a deep breath. “Are you shining at me?”

Dean gazes back at him for a moment before he barks out a semi-hysterical laugh that ends as abruptly as it started. “Are you serious?” he asks, and he seems genuinely aghast. “You’re asking me if I can read minds? Move furniture?”

Sam shrugs. “I don’t know Dean… but I know something isn’t right with you.” He taps his finger on the steering wheel, ponders, anything so he doesn’t have to think that he might ever remind his brother of Hell. And the germ of an idea is out there waving at him, floating a few hundred yards off the coast of his mind, and he’s throwing out a life ring and hauling it into shore. “Wait a minute,” he murmurs. You said something… about how you know everything, or you know it all. Something like that.” He frowns, seizes on it suddenly. “The car… the  _girl_. You said she was giving off a weird vibe, that she was mouthing off about you being a know it all.”

Dean shakes his head. “Car? Girl?”

“Yeah, the girl. In the car.”

Blank expression.

“The breakdown, Dean,” Sam says, exasperated. “Jammed starter motor, you got it going again. You said there was a teenage girl in the car bitching at her mom, and when you pulled her up over it she was really creepy… she said you thought you knew it all, but maybe you didn’t know as much as you thought.” His mind is racing ahead now, fitting it all together. “You know it all, but you’re forgetting things too… that’s got to be it, Dean, got to be…”

Dean makes a face. “Sorry, you lost me, man…”

Sam feels all the energy run out of him, feels it trickle down to the tips of his toes and spill out into a puddle in the footwell, and he flops his head back against the leather, closes his eyes. “Please Dean,” he mutters wearily. “Please tell me you haven’t forgotten what’s going on. The big picture. What we’re doing,  _trying_  to do. Trying to set right. We don’t have time for you to forget.”

It’s quiet but for the sound of Dean’s steady, even breaths, unhurried, unworried, even. “Oh, I know exactly what’s going on,” he says slowly. “I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, too.”

And Sam opens his eyes and tilts his head to look, doesn’t know if he has ever heard his brother sound quite like he does, because Dean sounds dreamy and faraway, like he’s tripping, but still there’s a steeliness to his voice, and it’s terrifying in its surety and conviction.

“I have a rendezvous with death,” he murmurs. “On some scarred slope of battered hill…” He trails off, and he’s staring ahead, and he doesn’t blink.

Sam swallows hard, and something is tingling up and down his spine, something cold and terrifying, no, _terrified_ , and when he speaks his mouth is so dry his voice catches in his throat. “It was conditional Dean,” he husks out. “What you said back there in Van Nuys, it was conditional. You got a do-over. Remember? It’s us, you and me. Team Free Will.” He stops there, doesn’t say anything about running, hiding, while Lucifer wastes the planet and everyone on it.

And Dean seems to shake himself out of his trance, looks at Sam like he doesn’t even know what he said, and grins his usual shit-eating grin. “Yeah,” he says. “Of course I remember. Screw destiny.”

Sam doesn’t really know if the moment of tension or whatever it was is broken or not. But he knows he can’t shake the feeling of unease inside, can’t pinpoint exactly what it means either. “That kid,” he offers, and he thinks he might sound desperate. “It’s got to be her, Dean. A curse. That’s what it is. Maybe she’s a witch.”

Dean nods agreeably. “Curse. Got to be.” He motions his head sharply at the back seat. “Get some sleep,” he says. “We’ll talk about it at Bobby’s. Maybe it’ll come back to me as I drive.”

Sam mimics his brother’s belly-surf in reverse, and his long body sticks halfway because he never did have Dean’s catlike agility, limbs too long and gangling, and he ends up crumpling gracelessly down onto his head in the space between the front and back seats.

Dean rassum-frassums under his breath as he butt shuffles over into the driver’s seat. “Witches, oy. All that sisters of the moon crap.” He shudders dramatically. “Skeevy, fuckin’ skeevy.” And he looks back over his shoulder, suddenly cheery again. “Bobby can sort it. Or Cas. He’ll trot out the mojo, get me fixed.”

Sam’s heart sinks, and he can’t find it in himself to remind Dean that Castiel is gone. He suddenly remembers reading about some guy who lost his memory in a car crash and every time he woke up he’d forgotten his family died, and the doctors had to tell him again, each day, for the rest of his short life. He shudders at the prospect as he hauls himself up on to the seat.

The car lurches back onto the road. “You know, it might be useful,” Dean throws back at him. “Knowing it all. In the circumstances.”

“Not if the flipside is that you’re forgetting a whole bunch of old stuff as fast as you’re finding out the new stuff,” Sam retorts. “Which seems to be the case.” He pillows his jacket under his head, punches into it viciously. “You better not forget how to get there,” he gripes.

Dean chuckles.  _Normal_. “Or how to drive.”

Just as Sam is settling down, he sees a flash of silver under the front seat, and he reaches out, snags it. The cuffs, or one of them anyway, and the steel chain attaching the bracelets has been rended, split, snapped.  _You broke the chain_ , he thinks.  _Heavy-duty steel chain links_.

His brother shoots a quick glance back at him, winks. “Yeah, who’d have thunk? Metal fatigue, I guess.”

Sam shoots bolt upright so swiftly his head spins. “Are you reading my fucking mind?” he demands hotly. “Level with me here, Dean.”

He sees his brother’s shoulders go rigid, and Dean’s voice bristles with irritation. “What the fuck, Sam?” he snaps. “You said it out loud, said I broke them. And I answered you. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Sam glares at the back of Dean’s head, tries to backtrack to himself forming the words with his tongue and lips, speaking them, and he can’t honestly remember if he did or not. He flops back down again, stares at the roof of the car for a few minutes. “Maybe it isn’t a mind-reading curse,” he ventures hopefully, because the thought Dean might be able to see inside his head is too awful to contemplate. “Knowing it all doesn’t have to mean mind reading, does it?  _Dean?_ ”

There’s no reply but somehow Sam can sense it, a sudden, smoldering fury, and Dean is pulling off the road again, turning around slowly, and his eyes are incandescent. “So, Sammy,” he says, in a voice tight with anger. “You want to tell me about how you screwed that bitch in the back of my car?

***

Rage doesn’t even come close as Dean slams out of the car and takes Bobby’s porch steps in one bound before hammering on the door, and it sets off a fusillade of barking somewhere in the bowels of the house that sets his nerves on edge because  _fuckin’ dogs_ , it’s never been the same since Hell, fuck, since the woods and Bender’s pitbull, and Bobby keeps those big Omen dogs that stare him out with dark, bottomless eyes that seem to  _know_.

The sound of the old man hollering at the mutt to shut it, and the knowledge it’ll be chained up out back five minutes after they arrive, barely soothes his jitters and the noise of Sam shuffling up the steps behind him sends his anxiety into the stratosphere. And it makes no sense, his grief that Sam soiled himself with her, the disgust that he’s up close and personal with something wrong, a  _stain_ , something dipped in the filth of the Pit, because he knows what Azazel did, knows his brother spent the best part of a year topping up the tank, knows about  _them_. But it’s like finding out for the first time, like the dirt and deception of her is still under Sam’s nails, her grime absorbed into his brother’s flesh so he can see it in Sam’s pores, imagine it embedded into the loops, whorls and arches of his fingertips where they caressed her skin, and the sulfur stink of her is on Sam’s breath and in his sweat, a miasma that surrounds him.  _Ruby_ , and she screeches along Dean’s senses in a way she never even did before he stared into her eyes, sank the knife into her guts, and saw her smoke, and flash, and die.

He can hear Sam shifting about behind him, from foot to foot, maybe, can hear the rustle of fabric, fancies Sam might be reaching out to poke him in the back, and he curls in on himself, brittle. “Don’t touch me,” he hisses. “You’re unclean.” He hears his brother suck in a breath, and he doesn’t wait for a response, stalks in past Bobby the second the door opens. And the old man grabs his arm and swings him round, and Bobby is holding a silver blade. And when Dean looks down he’s standing in a devil’s trap, and Omen Dog isn’t chained up at all, it’s watching him from the next doorway along, panting calmly.

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” he barks, and he deliberately plants one boot over the painted border.

Bobby raises an eyebrow. “Precaution,” he snaps back, and he produces a flask he has tucked in beside his thigh, offers it over.

“We did all this,” Sam says quietly from behind him. “I even tried to exorcise him. He’s not a demon, Bobby. I think it’s a curse.”

Dean snorts derisively in his brother’s direction. “Maybe you should try using your evil hand.”

Sam doesn’t meet his eyes, and Bobby sits there, rock solid in his chair, immovable, and watches impassively as he swigs from the flask, tips the rest of it over his head for good measure. “Satisfied?” He slams the flask down into the old man’s hand. “I can’t be possessed,” he says, bitterly. “I’m off-limits. Protected. I’m a special snowflake, didn’t you know? God’s champion.”

Bobby eyes him for a minute. “Grumpy little bastard too,” he finally says. “What the fuck climbed up your ass?”

Dean clutches at thin air with his fingers. “I have no fuckin’ idea,” he snaps. He jerks his head back behind him. “He thinks Sabrina the teenage witch laid some mojo on me on some back road up the ass of nowhere.” And now the dog is growling at him, low under its breath, and it  _knows_. “And chain your fuckin’ dog, or I’ll plug it.”

Bobby bristles. “Watch your mouth, boy. You ain’t too big for a clip round the ear and I’ll be damned if I—”

And suddenly it’s too much and Dean is dizzy, rubbing at his eyes. “Look,” he says, soft now. “Please put the dog outside, Bobby. I can’t – you know. The dog, it…” And Sam has his hand under his arm and he’s shepherding him over to a chair, sitting him down, and he heaves out a sobbing sigh of relief as Bobby shoves the mutt out ahead of the chair.

Sam is kneeling next to Dean, and his giant hand is on Dean’s knee. “Something’s wrong Dean,” he’s saying earnestly. “This isn’t you. But we’ll fix it.”

Dean stares back. “This isn’t me,” he repeats mechanically, and then he says it again because on some level he knows it’s a clue and that all he has to do is work out what the mystery is and everything will be clear.

Sam glances away and over at the doorway as Bobby rolls back in, bottle slotted in between his thighs.

The old man hands it over and Dean unscrews the lid, gulps the liquor, and it’s tasteless, doesn’t scorch the back of his throat, there’s no fire to it at all, and he stares at the label, grimaces. “You trying to tell me something, Bobby?”

“Such as?”

Dean smiles weakly. “I know you got better stuff than this. Not like you to try and get the piss water past me. I know I’ve been knocking it back some, but it’s no reason to dilute the liquor.”

The old man stares back, purses his lips. “That ain’t piss water, Dean,” he announces dryly. “That’s Wild Turkey. Eighty proof. Like it says on the label. Paintstripper.”

Dean raises an eyebrow, smirks. “Yeah, right.” He swallows another few gulps, because his throat is dry, and at least the liquor is wet. “Can’t you get a sheepdog or something?” he blurts out abruptly. “One of those Lassie mutts? Or a lab? Something less, less – just  _less_.”

Bobby’s eyes flicker with something that might be understanding but he doesn’t reply. Dean glances up at his brother, who looks whey-faced and worn out, and he offers him the booze.

Sam takes it, knocks back a mouthful, explodes in splutters and coughs and watering eyes, spraying whiskey everywhere. “J-jesus… Christ…”

It prickles at Dean right out of the blue, and he makes a face. “I think we say that too much.” 

Sam is wiping his mouth in between huffing out air and trying to catch a breath, and he tents his brows, eyes wide and questioning.

Dean shrugs. “We say that too much,” he repeats. “It’s blasphemy.”

“Blasphemy?” Bobby chimes in. “Well now I’m officially worried. What the hell are you talkin’ about, boy?”

Dean is suitably solemn. “Blasphemy. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.”

Bobby stares at him, glances at his brother, looks back.

“It’s one of the ten commandments,” Dean says, and then, helpfully, “I know everything.”

“I know it’s one of the ten fuckin’ commandments, idjit,” Bobby snaps out. “I have read the bible.” He stares balefully back, slants his eyes over at Sam. “What the hell happened?”

Sam shakes his head, throws up his hands. “Where do I start?” he says. “We were about twenty miles out of Heber after it all went down, and I saw a car stopped on the verge, breakdown. Dean popped the hood, got it going again, we left. But there was a kid in the car… teenage girl. I didn’t see her, but Dean says he got a vibe from her, that she called him a know it all. And…” he scrunches up his face. “Hey presto. He knows it all. And he keeps saying he feels spaced out, like his head is all fuzzy inside.”

Bobby shifts his focus back, frowns. “Did you take a blow to the head?”

Dean shrugs. “No clue, don’t remember. But I do seem to know it all.”

“It’s weird,” his brother chips in. “He knows things he doesn’t know, never knew. About nuclear fission, hip replacements. He’s spouting poetry. And he can speak German.”

“Je peux parler français aussi,” Dean says. “E italiano, e spagnolo.” There’s a brief, awed silence, and he shrugs. “I can speak French too. And Italian, and Spanish. I can speak every language there is.”

Bobby cocks his head. “Enochian too, apparently,” he says thoughtfully.

“There’s more,” Sam adds wearily. “After she said he knew it all, this kid said maybe he didn’t know as much as he thought. And he knows all this new stuff like I said, but he’s forgetting other stuff, stuff he’s known for years… hunter lore, people. And then he’s remembering it again, and, uh… sometimes he isn’t reacting too well.”

Sam’s voice goes quiet and regretful, and Dean knows it’s because of the silent drive, the air in the car so thick he could taste it on his tongue, the disgust he knows damn well oozed from him from the second he saw them, clear as day in his head, tangled limbs, sweat glistening, and her hands carding his brother’s hair while she whispered her lies and duplicity in his ears, salving his grief by fanning his rage.  _Not Sam’s fault_ , he says inside his head, and it’s like he’s having a conversation with himself, talking himself down.  _Not Sam’s fault_ , and he rubs at his jaw, leans into his hand and shuts it out.

“Can you find out what it is?” Sam is saying to Bobby as Dean drifts back to the now. “Are we going to need to go back to Heber, track this kid down?”

Bobby wheels himself over to the table, pulls a book out of a pile. “Depends. Most forgetting spells are forget-me-not love spells or just garden variety forgive-and-forget spells,” he says. “It’s the knowing it all sub-clause that’s tricky.” He squints at the page, looks up. “You sure you’re not just shining at us? Mind reading?”

Dean scowls. “No, I am not shining at you,” he grouses. “And shining doesn’t even mean mind reading. It means being able to see into the future. According to the master of horror.” He eyes Bobby for a minute then, smirks all sly and knowing. “Shirley Futterman,” he says.

Bobby goes rigid, looks up from the book. “Come again?”

Dean chuckles. “Funny, that’s exactly what you said to her. Shirley Futterman. You were seventeen and she was twenty-one. It was behind the Wyo Theater in Laramie…”

The old man’s mouth is hanging open now, and Dean can’t resist a glance at his brother. Sam’s mouth is a captivated O, his eyes huge with a mix of shock and thrilled fascination.

“In the Heat of the Night,” he leers, and he winks at Sam. “That was the movie,” he continues airily. “Appropriate, much? You and she did it four more times over the next two weeks, and Shirley loved that movie so much she had a special name for little Bobby, didn’t she? She called him Mister Tibbs—”

“We get the picture,” Bobby growls. The old man glares at him, pink under his beard. “What’s your point?”

Dean stretches, reaches for another gulp of piss water. “My point is that you weren’t thinking of that,” he says. “So I wasn’t mind reading.”

Bobby chews his lip for a second. “What am I doing next Saturday?”

“Next Saturday?” Dean echoes the old man. “How the fuck should I know?”

Slow nod. Then, “Where’s Shirley Futterman gonna be a year from now?”

Dean shrugs. “No clue. See? Not shining either.”

Bobby scribbles a note in the margin of his book, glances at Sam. “Seems like maybe he knows it all about stuff that’s already known,” he ventures. “Known facts, people he knows and things they’ve done. So maybe it follows on that it’s those things he’s forgetting too.”

Sam nods. “It seems to be intermittent. Like, he forgot who Cas was, but then on the drive here it seemed like he remembered again. And he forgot how to kill a wendigo—”

Dean holds up his hand. “With fire, or a silver bullet,” he cuts in, and he taps the ring where it glints on his finger. “Or even with a silver ring if you’re desperate.”

His brother waves a hand at him. “See what I mean?”

Bobby taps his pencil on the desk. “It’s coming and going.”

Dean cuts in, thoughtful. “Maybe I’m not really forgetting,” he offers. “Maybe I’m just non-prioritizing it. You know. Filing it away up there.” He taps his temple. “Like out of sight out of mind. Only out of mind, out of mind.”

“Speaking of which.” And Bobby leans across and gives him a hard clip round the ear.

Dean yelps. “What the fuck was that for?”

“For Mister fuckin’ Tibbs.” The old man’s brows are low, pulled together, a unibrow grimace of intense annoyance. “And because Sam here tells me you said yes.”

Dean rubs hard at his head, snaps testily, “It was conditional,” and then, “Ow! Bobby! What the fuck, man?” He reaches up to rub the other side, and the tip of his ear is smarting. He fires the evil eye at his brother. “Big mouth. Jesus Christ.”

Sam raises an eyebrow, and the message in his eyes is clear, _payback’s a bitch, dude_ , and Dean knows he deserves it, that he’s been like a bear with wasp up its butt since…  _when?_

“I heard your condition got met, right then and there.” Bobby takes off his cap and flicks it into the table. “Out of fuckin’ mind sounds about right. And I see blasphemy is back on the menu.”

Dean snorts, laughs out of left field. “I can’t believe I said that,” he confides. “Blasphemy… since when? I could hear myself saying the words, and it was like someone else was in my head speaking. Weird, man.”

And suddenly Bobby’s giving him that look now, mirroring Sam’s suspicion back at the motel, and on the road. “I’m me, Bobby,” he says quietly. “There’s nothing subletting me.”

Sam drums his fingertips on the tabletop, chips in. “He said his head was fuzzy,” he repeats. “Whooshing like a seashell, or like something was whispering to him. Oh, and a couple of times he said he felt like we were being watched.”

Dean shoots him an accusing look. “My nose is cold and wet, Sam,” he snaps. “I’m wagging my tail. I’m fine.” And to Bobby, “Zachariah had Sam bleeding out from his mouth, by the way. Buckets of it.”

The old man doesn’t take the bait. “Don’t try and steer me, boy,” he says balefully. “You killed Zachariah. And your blue-eyed boy said only an angel can kill an angel. Unless he lied to you about that as well?”

Dean’s irritation spikes suddenly, and he shoots up onto his feet, clenches his fists. “Aren’t we past this?” he forces out through gritted teeth. “Cas didn’t lie to me Bobby. He thought he was doing God’s will, and he was just as much out of the loop as we were.”

“He let your brother out,” Bobby growls. “Let him out to get high on demon blood and gank Lilith, and—”

“That’s exactly what you wanted to do, Bobby,” Dean cuts in harshly. “And don’t forget, you had your chance to stop Sam but you didn’t. If Cas hadn’t let him out Zachariah would have sent someone else to do it, and it still would have gone down just like it did because you’d still have let Sam walk.”

Bobby fixes him with a hard, flat stare, doesn’t reply. And Dean breathes himself down, plants his ass back on the chair. “If Cas had said no, Zachariah would have toasted him, and where the fuck would we be then?” he says. “He was going to warn me something was up, and he got ass-reamed for it, by his own kind. But he came through for me – for  _us_  – in the end. He had a choice, and he chose—” He stops abruptly, because Sam is looking down at his boots, and because his next word is  _me_.  _He chose me, when my own brother didn’t_ , he thinks. “He chose to do the right thing,” he continues, carefully. “When Zachariah spilled that God wasn’t running the show, Cas did the right thing. He doesn’t lie to me. And it isn’t his fault he can’t…” He flicks his eyes down, at the old man’s legs. “It isn’t his fault,” he says again. “He’d do it if he could.”

Bobby considers him, tweaks his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “Point taken,” he grudges out, and then he raises a dubious eyebrow. “But if you’re saying he doesn’t lie to you, then what exactly are you saying, Dean? Given what he said about angels killing angels?”

Dean looks back and forth from the old man to his brother and back again, palms his face. “Look. Can we just – can we stay on topic here?” he says. “This, whatever it is – it could be frying my brain cells. Like when O’Neill looked into that alien head-grabbing doohickey.”

Bobby stares him down for a minute, relents. “So what do you remember about this weird kid?” he says finally.

Dean sighs out, rueful mixed with relief. “Not much… just some flashes. But yeah, there was a vibe from her. Like – static or something. Like I could feel her on my skin. She said I was a know it all. Something like that.” He frowns, scrubs at his hair. “And there was something she was doing, if I could just remember. I think it was important.”

Sam leans across, puts a hand on his arm. “Maybe we need to get some sleep,” he suggests quietly. “It might help, with the fuzzy head. The whooshing.”

Dean shakes off his brother’s hand, damned aggressively if he’s honest. “I’m fine, Sam, I’m not tired.”

Sam glances at his wristwatch. “It’s been twenty seven hours since we’ve slept properly, Dean. I’m exhausted and there’s no way you aren’t either. Maybe it’s why—”

“I said I’m not tired, Sam,” Dean snaps. “The fuzzy head has nothing to do with being tired. Alright? Now back the fuck off.”

His brother’s face closes down and he stiffens, and in the background Dean sees Bobby sneak his hand out, sees the old man deftly whip the liquor bottle up and out of his reach. “I’m not drunk either,” he protests.

Sam clears his throat, and he could swear his brother sounds nervous. “Well. Maybe it’s tinnitus,” he suggests. “You know. Ringing in your ears. From the noise when it all went down in Van Nuys.”

Dean makes a face. “What noise?”

“The noise. After you said yes.  _Michael_. Coming on down, I assume.” Sam cocks his head. “It was earsplitting, Dean,” he says, exasperated. “You have to have heard it.”

“I didn’t hear any noise,” Dean replies. “I heard a voice. I think. Yeah… him coming, maybe. I suppose.” He sees Sam’s eyes widen. “Before I took it back,” he adds hurriedly. “And Cas said true vessels can hear the angels speak, remember? Like Jimmy did. We know I’m a vessel. It doesn’t mean anything other than that.”

“Well what was he saying?” Bobby chips in.

“Actually I don’t know,” Dean says stupidly. “I wasn’t really paying attention because of the light.”

“The light?” Sam says slowly.

“Yeah, Zachariah,” Dean says, and he whistles out his awe. “When he went up. His grace just exploded out of him, right there in front of me. Like a fuckin’ rocket taking off, like Saturn Five. Not two inches away. It was pretty damn awesome.” Dean is nodding as he speaks, stops dead as he sees his brother’s expression, and it’s a confusing mixture of shock, horror, add a dash of totally bewildered. “What?” he says defensively. “What now, what did I—” And he’s cut off by an abrupt tingling, a tickling sensation along his nerve endings, a sixth sense feeling, an odor, sulfur, burning,  _eau de Pit_ , and there’s a simultaneous crescendo of barking and yelling from outside.

It’s a drill they’ve practiced and perfected, as his brother launches himself at the light switch, plunges the room into darkness, heads up the hallway to the door, and Dean slinks to the window, pushing Bobby out of the line of fire as he goes. He pulls his Colt out of his waistband in one fluid movement, slams a hand up over his nose and mouth to stop himself from gagging at the smell. He recoils as a handful of gravel smatters against the glass, ducks back, dares to peer one eye beyond the window frame. It’s quiet, no crickets even, and he can see Sam gesturing furiously from the darkness up near the front door.

“You ready?” Bobby asks, and as Dean nods, the old man flicks a lever and floodlights flash on, illuminating the ground around the house for a good twenty yards out.

And there he is, standing out front and center, blinking in the brightness, dapper in his overcoat, puffing on his cigarette.

Dean shakes his head, murmurs, “What the hell?” And he stalks past Bobby, can hear the old man trundling along in pursuit and calling him, but he continues on up the hallway. “Knife,” he snaps. “Have it ready.” He motions his brother to one side, flings open the door.

“Before you start anything, I’m here with an offer,” the man says, and he has his hands up, palms down, placating, but he’s backing away. “I didn’t come here for a barney.”

Dean stands on the porch step, can hear his brother breathe out the name from beside him.

“Crowley.”

***

It’s the stench that gave the bastard away, rotten, the smell of things long dead, the stink of decay, putrefaction, so thick on the air that when Dean inhales he can feel it slither up inside his nostrils like a living thing, wriggling its way through his olfactory system, bombarding its receptor cells so mercilessly that klaxons sound the alarm, and they scream wrong, diseased, unclean,  _taint_. And it’s like he’s piercing the veil, seeing their true faces again, only baser, because he’s smelling their core, the rancid black essence at their center, and it’s filth, contamination, _impure_. He can sense his brother next to him, shifts slightly, focuses on his solid strength, his reality. Tries to ignore the fact that even if it’s fainter than what emanates in waves from Crowley, he can smell it on Sam too.  _You stink of the Pit_ , he rails inside his head, but he swallows it down.

“The colt didn’t work,” Sam grates out coldly. “We lost friends. For nothing.”

Crowley sniffs. “Well, you took them there,” he snipes. “It was your decision. Doesn’t have to interfere with business though, does it? I still want the devil dead, so we’re still in this together, boys. Am I right? Or am I right?”

He’s cagey, eyes darting about nervously, and Dean can see the meatsuit’s nose twitching, and he wonders if Crowley can smell the same defilement on him, if they’re doing the equivalent of dogs sniffing each other’s butts to get properly acquainted.

“Look, straight up,” the demon continues, not missing a beat, his agitation ramping up as he talks. “I didn’t know it was dodgy, all my intel said the damn thing was a dead cert. What can I say? It’s a learning curve. But I didn’t mess you around. And I lost on this one too, big time. I’m totally buggered. Which reminds me…” He punches up aggressively at Bobby’s floodlights, both hands, left and right, and the lamps flash, sparks flying as the glass shatters, and the lot is plunged into moonlit darkness again. “That’s better,” Crowley snaps. “Since I’m being hunted. And you never know who could be watching me standing here, in public, talking to the Winchester brothers.”

Dean raises an eyebrow. “Word got out, huh?” he sneers. “And now you’re on the devil’s hit list? Tough fuckin’ shit. If I had his cellphone number, I’d tip him off myself. Now, my brother here,” and he jerks his head at Sam, “has the knife that really can kill you sonsofbitches. So,  _dust_ , pal. Right the fuck now. Unless you want another slit.”

And Crowley narrows his eyes, and now he’s looking Dean up and down, like he’s taking the measure of him, and he has a half-smile on his lips. “I can get you Pestilence,” he says suddenly. “I know where he is. I know what he has planned too.” He whistles out, shakes his head. “It’s not pretty, I can tell you that. Little virus they’ve been faffing about with for a few years now. Perfecting, if you like. It’s the dog’s bollocks, boys. What you saw in Concrete won’t even come close.”

Sam nudges Dean, leans closer. “Croatoan,” he mutters.

And fuck, it’s 2014, and Croatoan jumpstarted the endgame, and Dean finds he’s breathing fast and heavy because all he can see is the wreck of the porch he’s standing on, the mess in the house, and Bobby’s chair upended, bloodsmeared, and in his head six-billion voices are wailing  _Detroit_  at him and over their screams he can still hear the thing that wears his brother whispering sickly sweet sympathy in his ears. “Where is he?” he growls.

Crowley smiles whitely at him, rocks on his feet. “Do you think I’m thick or something?” he says. “You have to promise me you won’t kill me.  _Before_ I tell you.”

Dean can feel his brother tense beside him, can almost sense Sam gripping the knife tighter, knows he’s poised to let it fly.

“We promise,” Sam hisses, and he takes a few steps forward. “Where is he?”

Crowley takes a step back. “Not so fast, twinkletoes,” he snaps. “I don’t like you. And I don’t trust you.” He points at Dean. “He has to promise.  _Him_. He has to promise me that I live through this, that neither of you two numbskulls pops me, tries to pop me, pays someone else to pop me, or arranges my accidental death.” He looks past Dean, at the doorway. “The old geezer too. But him…” He stabs a finger towards Dean, stares him down, insolent. “His promise is the one that matters to me.” He smirks. “Call it Winchester witness protection.”

Dean can hear Bobby murmuring from behind him, something about trusting a demon, and he stares it out with Crowley, eyes locked on and steady. “I promise,” he announces, and he hears Sam’s indrawn breath.

“Dean, for crying out loud, are you fucking  _nuts?_  He’s—”

“Telling the truth,” Dean cuts in. “He isn’t lying, Sam.” He slants his eyes across to his brother. “I know everything, remember? And I know he isn’t lying. About this, or about wanting to ice the devil.”

Crowley nods vigorously, sidles closer. “I’m on your side,” he says confidentially. “Strange times make for strange bedfellows, young Sam… enemy of my enemy and all that.” He smiles, flicks a look back at Dean, and his eyes are narrowed and speculative again. “Just do me a favor, huh? Promise me again. On your father’s honor this time.”

Dean cocks his head. “My father’s honor?” For a second he remembers the promise he made to Castiel, to obey, and he snorts derisively. “I promise, on my father’s honor. Such as it is. How’s that?”

Sam crowds around in front of him, incredulous. “Jesus, Dean, we don’t know enough about him to trust anything he ever tells us again after Ellen and Jo, and even if he—”

“I know all about him,” Dean says, mechanically. “Crowley’s been here for a long time, he was Azazel’s wingman, Lilith’s too.” He stops, reconsiders. “He was their John the Baptist, came to prepare the way for them…”

Crowley sniggers. “John the Baptist? That’s a new one. And call me a sexist pig, but I prefer to think of Lilith as  _my_ wingman.”

“Okay,” Sam snarls. “You’re a sexist pig.”

Dean throws his brother a look that Sam matches unblinkingly, before he rolls his eyes and turns his attention back to the demon. He steps down into the dirt, takes a few more steps that bring him closer, glances back over his shoulder. “Oh, and the meatsuit’s a pub landlord,” he says. “Boozer on the Isle of Dogs.”

Crowley sniffs. “Well, since you’re shining at me—”

“I’m not fuckin’ shining,” Dean grates out crabbily, and a burst of light flares briefly as Crowley strikes a match, lights up another cigarette, and in the glow cast by the flame Dean can see a calculating gleam in the demon’s eyes, and for a split second it’s somehow  _knowing_ , like Crowley has figured something out and he isn’t in on the joke, and then it’s gone.

“I do miss the old girl,” Crowley concedes mournfully.

“Yeah,” Dean says coldly. “She was a joy to be around.”

“Twit,” Crowley snipes. “I mean my pub. The Cock and Bull…” He smiles fondly. “Those were the days. If you thought Hell was bad, you should try Millwall Docks in the seventies. But Lilith?” He hoiks a spitball into the dust beside his shoe. “I don’t give a shit about Lilith,” he declares. “Bint had it coming. You did me a favor, quite frankly.” He quirks his head. “Well. Apart from the whole releasing Satan sub-clause. What the large print giveth, the fine print taketh away. Every time, Sam. You should know that. Unless Stanford pre-law isn’t what it’s cracked up to be?”

Behind them, Bobby clears his throat harshly and Dean glances back at the old man. “Dean,” he says meaningfully. “A word?”

Crowley holds up his hands. “Don’t mind me,” he says cheerfully. “Have your little chinwag. I come in peace. Not going to try anything. Not a thing.”

Dean jerks his head at Sam, makes his way back up the steps behind his brother as Bobby swivels the chair around, wheels back in through the door, and he knows what’s coming, lounges against the doorjamb, watches as Crowley grins back up at him and sucks on his cigarette.

“Are you sure this is wise?” Bobby says bluntly, and he doesn’t get any further before Sam jumps in.

“Dean. Are you seriously telling me you trust him after what happened in Carthage? And how did he even find us, we have hexbags… is it him who’s been watching you? And what the hell was all that about staring into Zachariah’s grace when you ganked him, because—”

“I’m not debating Zachariah’s grace with you right now, Sam,” Dean snaps back. “It didn’t burn out my eyes, I’m fine. And no, I don’t trust Crowley. I said he’s telling the truth. Which he is – about this, anyway. There’s a difference.” He glances over at the demon, returns his friendly nod, albeit unenthusiastically, turns his attention back to his brother. “I don’t trust demons, remember?” he adds cuttingly, and Sam scowls back at him. “Look,” he says then. “He’s hinky as Hell, I know that. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. But he knows stuff, stuff that can help us. And his only interest is him, which means he’ll deal if he thinks it’ll help him in the long term.”

Sam stares back darkly. “It also means he’ll doublecross us if he thinks it’s in his best interests,” he insists. “I of all people should know that. I don’t think we should deal with him, Dean, not after what happened with Ellen and Jo. We should end the sonofabitch right now.”

From over in the moonlit yard, Crowley waves, calls out, “He promised,” as he points at Dean. “And I'm not watching you,” he adds. “Your yard is in the phonebook, old man. I knew they’d turn up here eventually. I’m not dense.”

Bobby snorts. “I see they have bionic fuckin’ ears too.” He beckons Dean closer, leans forward so they’re practically nose to nose. “I vote to gank him. And after that, we’re _damn_  well debating Zachariah’s grace. What the hell were you thinking, boy?”

Dean doesn’t react. “Are you really still in the phonebook?” he says. “That’s a tad risky, even if Cas did do your ribs for you.”

Bobby stares up at him, flinty-eyed. “I need the business,” he growls. “I make an honest living, remember? Mostly, anyway. They haven’t tried anything yet, and since I need a catheter to take a piss these days, I don’t really care if they do. And don’t change the subject.”

Dean feels a stab of disquiet at Bobby’s words, an uncomfortable reminder of the bullet the old man said he was saving. But it isn’t the time or place to pick up that ball, and he knows his brother is forcing himself to keep schtum too, can see Sam clenching his fists in his peripheral vision, can see his brother’s knuckles whiten.

Bobby stops for a minute, takes a few deep breaths, calms down. He tugs at his beard, lowers his voice. “Look… so this guy says he can get us a Horseman. That’s all well and good, assuming he is telling the truth, but should we really be prioritizing the Horsemen at this stage? Shouldn’t we be going for the powerball? _Lucifer_? Instead of getting sidetracked?” 

Sam leans in. “Dean, Bobby’s right. For all we know he could be in cahoots with Lucifer,” he whispers urgently. “This could be a set up to throw us off track, to sideline us in some wild goose chase while the devil checkmates us without us even knowing.”

Crowley is checking his wristwatch now, shifting his weight from foot to foot, shaking his head in exasperation and talking to himself animatedly. He looks up, catches Dean’s eye. “I took a risk coming here, and I’m on a tight schedule,” he hollers impatiently. “Apocalypse, soon. I don’t have all night.” He thumbs the air over his shoulder. “I can just get in my car and piss off out of here if you aren’t interested in doing business.”

Dean squints into the darkness, just barely sees the outline of some innocuous looking sedan parked up near Bobby’s gates, well out of earshot. “Why do they even need cars when they can teleport?” he says, distractedly.

“Ruby said it’s something to do with them being from the Pit,” Sam replies quietly, almost reluctantly, like he doesn’t want to let on that he ever might have talked to her about anything more profound than where the next demon was. “It means they’re tied to the core of the earth… she used to say they couldn’t be airbound, it wasn’t natural. It drains them to keep zapping everywhere. Especially long distances.”

“Like a honeybee,” Dear murmurs. “They shouldn’t be able to fly. It violates the laws of aerodynamics.”

“The angels are different,” Sam says. “ _Of the air_. That’s what she called it.”

Dean stares up to the sky at his brother’s words, and it’s infinite and inky, looks like a promise, and he wants to fall into it. And then Bobby is saying something in the distance, and Dean drags his attention back to Sam’s face, and on the way his eyes track across Bobby’s piles of wrecks, lit up by the cold light of the moon, four and five high, some of the stacks listing precariously, the odd jalopy tumbled over, doors hanging and wheels in the air, cannibalized car doors and fenders strewn about. And he shivers, because it’s another reminder of what Zachariah showed him, and for a second he’s back in the future, Kansas city’s deserted waste land, burnt-out shells of cars and trucks, upturned, tires missing, smashed storefronts, rusted shopping carts piled up with looted electrical goods that won’t work because there’s no more power to feed them, and then he’s running from the Crotes, and he’s outnumbered, and they’re gaining on him and—

“Dean. Dean?”

His brother has his hand on his shoulder, is shaking him, eyes warm with concern. “Dean. Are you fuzzy again? Spacing out?”

Dean blinks up at Sam, shakes his head, shakes off the hand. “No… no. My head’s clear, sharper than it has been for a while… it’s just. The  _virus_. Croatoan. What Crowley said.”

Sam cocks his head, quizzical.

“Going after Pestilence won’t sidetrack us,” Dean insists. “The future Zachariah showed me, remember? Croatoan. It’s how Lucifer set the endgame in motion. He raised the Horsemen for a reason didn’t he? To loose chaos so he could get the upper hand. We saw that in River Pass, with War. So if Pestilence is pulling the strings when it comes to the virus, then if we get him, get his  _ring_ , it might take Croatoan out of the picture.”

Crowley butts in again from his spot in the yard. “Could make a big difference,” he calls. “I mean, Satan forbid the proletariat should get itself an organized resistance instead of frothing at the mouth and belting around the place like hyperactive lemmings on acid.”

Sam glares back at him, huffs out, turns back. “I still think it’s a mistake to—”

“And eating each other,” Crowley sings out. “While Lucifer takes advantage of the chaos in the meantime.”

They both spin around to stare out at the demon now.

“Do you know what the point of a blitzkrieg is, boys?” Crowley asks sunnily.

Dean waits a beat before he replies. “Blitzkrieg,” he says quietly. “A lightning war. Constant motion that keeps the enemy off-balance, making it difficult to respond effectively. Until it’s too late to get back on terms.”

Crowley nods, blows out cigarette smoke in a perfect series of rings that float up and dissipate into the night air. “Only Lucifer isn’t bothered with tanks and bombs,” he says. “He’s all about getting the most done with the least effort. And I’d wager Croatoan will sign, seal and deliver the  _constant motion_  our friend has in mind without him having to break sweat.” He drops his cigarette butt, toes it into the dirt. “So, Dean. What’s it to be?”

Dean can sense Sam’s tension like his brother is transmitting it to him telepathically, and there’s a minute where he wonders if the kid in the car did lay the shining on him and he really is reading Sam’s mind. And he even does what he imagines might approximate to reaching out mentally, opens up what he imagines might be the  _channels of communication_ , and he feels like a fuckin’ idiot as he does it, feels like he’s intruding too. And he doesn’t really want to admit to the fact that if there was some sort of feedback loop, he’s afraid of what he might find out. “What have you got?” he says, and only the barely perceptible sigh Sam puffs out as he replies to Crowley tells him what his brother thinks of his decision.

Crowley smiles. “Well, I don’t have Pestilence  _per se_ ,” he says. “I have what you might call his wingman. Though I prefer to think of him as the Horsemen’s stable lad. Handles their itineraries, if you like, arranges all of their personal appearances. Weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, you get the—”

“Yeah, we do,” Dean says shortly. “So where is he?”

Crowley motions casually into the distance. “As it happens, he’s in the boot of my car right at this moment in time.”

***

Sam stares down into the trunk, swallows thickly because it’s familiar, looking down at a bound body with a bag over its head, only this time the bag is soaked black with blood in the glow of his Maglite, and the body is still, quiet, and then suddenly it isn’t, it’s her face, mocking,  _look at you, all ’roided up_ …

He startles as Crowley clucks his tongue right next to him, elbows him. “Well, you’re the muscle,” the demon quips. “I’d rather not get blood on the threads if you don’t mind. This coat’s cashmere. Paul Smith.”

Dean is behind him, clears his throat uneasily, and Sam wonders if the fuzz has cleared enough so his brother is remembering what he said in the car on the road out of Heber, about the nurse, thinks maybe Dean is doing exactly that when he speaks.

“Sam. Uh – you want me to get that?”

Sam takes a deep, grounding breath. “No. I got it.” He leans in, drags the body up, bends at the knees as he hoists it onto his shoulders and it flops limply, dead weight. He glances at Crowley. “Is he likely to come round any time soon?”

The demon shrugs. “Well, there’s a devil’s trap Sharpied on that bag he’s wearing over his head, and I whacked him with a tire iron about seventeen times,” he says matter of factly. “I’d say that gives us another half-hour at least to strap him down and ward him properly.”

“And what’s to stop him from smoking out once he comes round?” Dean snaps.

“Binding spell,” Crowley announces. “I carved it on his chest. He’s a permanent resident as long as we want him to be. I’m sure it’ll be an important part of our bargaining strategy.” He looks up towards the house, where light floods out of the doorway. “Inside, I assume?” He sets off, walking briskly, looks back as Dean hails him.

“Who the hell invited you?”

Sam settles his load more comfortably on his shoulders, ignores his brother’s muttered oath as he starts following the demon, and Dean trots ahead of him.

Crowley spins, shuffles backwards as he talks. “You might need me,” he announces. “This one’s a tough nut, a real wide boy. And there’s—what? What the  _fuck?_ ” He stops dead, balances on one leg as he examines his shoe. “Haven’t you morons heard of poop scoopers?” he yelps, wipes his foot frantically on the grass.

“I said, who the hell invited you?” Dean repeats acidly.

“These are hand-made Anello and Davides,” Crowley seethes.

“Anello and Davide. Is that like Siegfried and Roy?”

The demon’s voice shoots up a few octaves. “Anello and Davide make shoes for Elton fucking John, I’ll have you know.”

“I don’t give a—”

“And the Beatles.”

“Aren’t they all dead?” And then, because Dean knows it all, “Fuck, are you really from the  _sixties?_ ”

Sam skirts around them and keeps walking, can hear them bickering away behind him. He speeds up, hefts the body up the porch steps and in through the door, staggers along the hallway into the back regions of the house, and Bobby already has the chair ready, dead center of the spray-painted trap, ropes and cuffs on the floor waiting. He tips the meatsuit down onto the seat, turns, and Dean is suddenly right there behind him, so jittery he’s almost tap dancing with it.

“Dammit, Bobby, did you have to break the trap at the front door?” his brother barks, as Crowley appears at his shoulder and steps into the room.

The demon is nodding his approval as he studies his surroundings. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” he says to Bobby.

The old man scowls across at them from where he’s cuffing the meatsuit’s wrist to the chair frame. “I let him in because you said he was on the level about this, boy,” he says irritably. “Otherwise I’d have been happy to gank him.”

Crowley is looking up and down, keeping his distance. “Excellent use of the standard devil’s trap, ceiling and floor,” he notes, “and very crafty placement of hexbags at points north, south, east and west.” He gestures past Bobby’s shoulder, nods for emphasis. “I like the crucifix. Of course it’s a myth they actually work, but it looks authentic… very Exorcist, very Salem’s Lot.” He glances behind him, laces his voice with respect, admiration. “One of those angel blasting sigils, if I’m not mistaken…”

Dean grips Crowley’s shoulder, starts to spin him round. “You can be on the level from outside the house,” he grates, and he suddenly pales, reels on his feet and claps his hand to his mouth. “Fuck,” he mutters from behind his fingers.

Sam is right there, propping his brother up, bearing his weight for him as his knees buckle. “Fuzzy head?” he asks urgently. “I can get this, you need to rest.”

Crowley drips fake concern. “Something wrong?” he enquires. “Is he under the weather? Not feeling  _himself_ , perhaps?” He smiles knowingly.

“Shut up,” Sam growls. “There’s nothing wrong with him.” He starts to reach into his back pocket for the knife, and he finds he can’t do it and support his brother, considers whether to walk Dean out of the room or sit him on the floor so he can get this over with.

Dean is shaking his head, eyes scrunched closed. “No… head’s fine,” he mutters. “Smell. Jesus. He smells bad… just need to – get used to it. It’ll take a minute. Wasn’t so bad outside.”

Crowley smiles widely, stares straight at Sam. “He can smell the Pit on me. Like dogshite roasting in the sun, in a downwind. He can smell it on you too, I shouldn’t wonder, young Sam, after all the interesting shapes you made with sweet little Ruby.” He nods his head regretfully. “Now that’s what I call taking one for the team. But she always was a good girl, always did as she was—”

“Shut up,” Bobby cuts in from across the room. “Shut up, or by Christ I will end you myself, right now.”

Crowley flinches, just barely. “Ouch. Can we not blaspheme, please?” He smirks. “And what are you going to do, old man, run me down?” He switches his gaze back to Dean. “By the way, you don’t smell so good yourself.”

Sam feels his brother tense under his arm.

“Is that how I,” Dean starts, and he shudders, whispers it out. “Can you smell the Pit on me?”

The demon regards him for a long moment, expression neutral now. “Nope,” he says finally. “You smell like angel.”

Dean pulls his hand away from his mouth. “I smell like angel?”

“Yep. It’s all over you.”

Sam can’t help himself, blurts it out, intrigued. “What does angel smell like?”

Dean turns and glares at him accusingly for a second before he fixes his attention back to the demon, clears his throat. “Uh. Well? What does angel smell like?”

Crowley grimaces. “Like a bunch of fucking flowers. Like one of those stupid little plug-in air fresheners that make your house smell like vanilla. Like that Febreze stuff you spray on the couch to hide the smell of cat piss. Like the perfume department at Saks Fifth Avenue. Like a newborn baby’s hair.” He shudders theatrically. “I think that about covers it. And angel is to me what Pit is to you, Dean. So I trust you’ll forgive me if I’m not doing the happy dance about it myself.”

Dean is pulling away from Sam now, seems to be coming back to himself, never taking his eyes off the demon.

Crowley sniggers, eyes narrowed and cunning. “Of course, you have to wonder why it is Dean here smells like he’s been rolling in angel. Maybe all those rumors I’ve been hearing are true.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively. “So where is your celestial boyfriend? Only I heard he departed the mortal coil.”

Dean cocks his head. “That’s none of your damn business,” he says, low and controlled.

“Of course the rumors wouldn’t explain why you can suddenly sniff out my kind,” Crowley muses archly. He roots in his coat pocket, pulls out his cigarettes, glances at Bobby. “Mind if I have a fag?”

“Yes. I do,” the old man snaps.

The demon puts the box back in his pocket, snorts. “Anyway. I heard friend Castiel got himself vaporized helping you,” he mocks. “And all for nothing.”

“What happened to Castiel doesn’t matter,” Dean says, frostily.

“For nothing?” Sam hears himself say. “What do you mean for nothing?” And then he’s turning it on Dean. “And of course it matters, Dean…” His attention is suddenly caught by Bobby gesturing furiously at him, and the old man mouths _what the fuck?_  and Sam throws his hands up, clueless, because he’s seen his brother madder than hell at Cas but he’s never seen this shut down, mechanical lack of emotion at the angel’s name.

“Knife, Sam.”

And Sam can sense it coiled inside his brother, the explosion that’s about to blow Crowley to kingdom come, and that’s what it is, Dean is just distracted, hungry for the kill. And he hands over the blade, takes a step back, motions Bobby to retreat, and the old man is already moving.

Crowley’s eyes widen. “You promised!” he says indignantly. “You can’t break your promise, that’s why I said it had to be you, and—”

Dean laughs, a not entirely sane laugh. “You said I had to promise not to kill you  _before_  you told me,” he says. “You didn’t say anything about me not killing you after you told me.” He shakes his head in mock sympathy. “What can I say, Crowley? What the large print giveth, the fine print taketh away…”

He’s closing in, light on his feet, arms outstretched, crouched slightly, ready to pounce. And there are times when Dean sledgehammers in for the kill, and it’s all brute force and uncontrolled violence, and then there are times when it’s like watching a dance, all catlike grace and poise, and Sam could watch his brother kill anything when it’s like that, because Dean’s eyes blaze and it’s a thing of beauty. And he shuffles sideways so he can see properly, and he thinks of Ellen and Jo, blown to smithereens, and it’s  _justice_ , and damn well _git her done_ so he can sit his brother down and find out what the hell is going on with him.

The blade glints in the light as Dean raises his arm. And it hangs there in mid-air, and it’s like Dean is teasing, playing cat and mouse games. Only he’s not, because he clears his throat harshly.

“I can’t.”

Sam furrows his brow, throws a look at Bobby.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” the old man says.

“I mean, I can’t,” Dean mutters, and he lets his arm fall to his side. “I can’t kill him. I promised.”

Bobby’s face is a picture. “So what? Get on with it. Or I’ll do it.”

“No you won’t,” Dean says. “I won’t let you.”

“Won’t let me?” Bobby gapes.

“I can’t,” Dean repeats faintly. “I promised him.”

“You promised to re-tile my roof two summers ago and I’m still waiting,” the old man snaps. “Who cares what you promised him?”

“I care,” Crowley interrupts agitatedly. “I can damn well do without you trying to talk him out of it, and—”

“Jesus,” Sam sighs. “I’ll do it. Dean, hand it over.”

His brother turns around, slowly, holds the knife up and out. Holds it ready. “No.”

Sam nods, bites his lip. “Okay,” he says tightly. “We’ll do this now, then. What the hell is going on with you, Dean? Since when do you keep promises to demons? And Zachariah, the light. What was that? And since when do you say Cas doesn’t matter? It  _does_  matter, what happened to him, and—”

Dean’s staring at him, puzzled, frowning. “What are you talking about Sam?” he rasps. “Anyone would think he was dead or something, the way you’re—”

“But he is,” Sam almost-shrieks. “You were there. He blew himself away with that damn sigil, he carved it on his own chest with a box cutter so we could—”

“It doesn’t fuckin’ matter, Sam.” Dean is insistent, right up in Sam’s face now, voice rising in volume and pitch, and suddenly his eyes are molten, unearthly, pinprick pupils, and something is wrong, very wrong, because there’s a dull roar coming from somewhere, rustling, whispering, and the floor is shifting under Sam’s feet, undulating, and in the corner of his eye he can see Bobby’s wheelchair sliding about, the old man reaching out to grab at the curtains as he rolls over and comes to rest against the window.

“It doesn’t fuckin’ matter because Castiel is fine, Sam,” Dean hollers. “Do you hear me? He’s fine. Look –  _see?_ ”

And the house is shaking now, and Sam looks up and the light fitting is swinging wildly, and the glass doors of Bobby’s cabinets are crashing open and books are falling out onto the floor, and pictures are tumbling down from where they hang, and he can hear glass shattering.

“Do you  _see?_ ” his brother yells furiously, and he cuts his hand through the air savagely.

There’s a billionth of a fraction of a second when Sam could swear Dean flickers out of phase and he’s staring at thin air, and he blinks, sees that Dean is still right there in front of him. And there’s a flash, a bang like a car backfiring, and there Castiel is, dazed, bloody, clothes in tatters, swaying. Sam reaches out as he falls, catches him and falls to his knees, cradling the angel in his arms. He can hear Bobby shouting something above the roar, and it’s like a tornado bearing down on them now, wind high and moaning, and he can hear things falling elsewhere in the house, slamming on the floor of the room above. And then Crowley is leaning down in front of him.

“Didn’t you  _know?_ ” he shouts over the noise. “Are you _thick?_ ”

Something is glinting in Crowley’s hand, a knife, a shiv, and Sam flinches, shuffles back, pulling the angel with him and twisting around to shield him from the demon.

“Prat,” Crowley sneers, and he rolls his eyes. “It’s not for him. Or you.”

Sam looks past him, can see Dean standing in the middle of it all, his hands out and palms upwards, and he’s looking up and his eyes are blank, and  _fuck_ , but Sam could swear his brother is starting to glow, just like the old guy at the Seven-Eleven in Heber said. And now Crowley is weaving his way towards Dean, hands out to balance himself because the house is still shaking. No…  _no_ , Sam thinks, and he screams it out, because he’s too far away and Crowley is right up at Dean’s shoulder now.

And the demon pushes past, lurches over to the door, makes a slicing motion across his palm, slams his hand on the sigil.

The room lights up, so bright Sam’s pupils flare with agony even behind his closed eyelids, and then everything is stillness, silence, apart from his own breath and the matching percussion of Bobby’s labored panting.

And when Sam opens his eyes, his brother is gone.

***

Sam knows all the hiding places in the ramshackle old house,  _coming ready or not, Dean_ , hunts high and low, throws open closet doors, leaves footprints in the dust on the floors of rooms he doesn’t even remember. He pulls down the ladder that leads up to Bobby’s attic and crawls around between boxes, piles of books, and bundles of old newspapers held together with string, coughs up his lungs and spits out cobwebs while horrified spiders run for their lives. And he knows at any moment his brother is going to erupt from behind something and dogpile him face first into the insulation until he cries uncle, so he’s on his guard, keeps glancing behind him, waiting for Dean to pounce, but his brother is biding his time.

He takes the stairs back down three at a time, careers into the front door and adroitly pushes off it and along the hallway like Michael Phelps making a flip turn, crashes down the steps to the basement. He overturns furniture, checks the chest freezer because people can get trapped in those, tips out tea chests, rips through the panic room, checks under the beds in there, Hurricane Sam making landfall, and he’s category fucking five and nothing can withstand his force. And he thinks he sees Dean looming up out of the shadows to give him a Texas wedgie, and he whirls, but there isn’t anything there.

He crashes back up to the hall, out through the front door into the damp night, panting heavily every couple of minutes because he keeps forgetting to breathe. He sprints around back of the house to loose the dog because needs must, and if anything’s going to scare his brother out of his hiding place it’s the memory of Lilith’s dogs, and the mutt races off into the blackness of the lot, barking joyously.

Flashlight, in the trunk of the car, and then he’s jogging around in the dog’s wake, shining the beam into the murk, into the cabins of smashed up cars, trucks, even vans, though he knows Dean would never hide in a van,  _I feel like a fuckin’ soccer mom_ , only maybe he might just because he knows Sam won’t expect him to, so he shines the light in those too. And he knows damn well that Dean is stalking him, that he’s going to bushwack him from somewhere high up and tickle him until he’s red faced and weeping from it, but his brother is waiting for the right moment to catch him totally unawares.

And finally, when he’s looked everywhere he can think of where Dean might hide, Sam stands and hollers his brother’s name into the night until his voice cracks and fades.

“You know, there’s denial,” Crowley says from behind him, “and then there’s stark raving stupidity of the kind that totally misses the fact its own brother is—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sam grates out hoarsely. “It’s a curse, we ran into a witch on the road here. And Dean isn’t here to stop me from killing you.”

“Well,” the demon considers. “From what I’ve heard, it wouldn’t be the first time you ignored what he told you before—”

Sam whips around, reaches his hand out, starts to coax, tease, pull, sees Crowley start to flush and swallow hard. And then he remembers Dean’s face in the gloom behind Famine, his shock, his sadness, his disappointment, his defeat. He drops his hand to his side, and Crowley clears his throat feelingly.

“Where is he hiding?” Sam says then, with a kind of desperation. “We used to play hide and seek here all the time when we were kids… I know all the best places, and he isn’t in any of them. Where is he hiding?”

Crowley stares at him, impassive. “Word to the wise,” he says after a minute, and he jerks his head sharply towards the house. “The way the floor was shake, rattle and rolling in there, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your devil’s trap is looking like a lace doily. Which means you’ve potentially left wheels and your brother-in-law in there at the mercy of a real little toerag.”

Sam shifts his gaze from the demon to the house, and back again, and Crowley is shaking his head now, amused, or maybe bemused.

“You really didn’t know,” he says, on a laugh, and then he cocks his head, curious. “Did  _he_  know?”

Sam starts walking, trotting, speeds up as he takes the steps, hits the hallway at a run, skids into the back room.

It’s a mess, but it’s curiously tranquil, quiet. The demon is still slouched in the chair, and Bobby is still parked by the curtains, hasn’t moved an inch as far as he can tell. Castiel is splayed out on the floor next to the couch, frozen in a perfect stillness that looks terminal from where Sam is standing.

The parquet floor tiles are jutting up here and there, and Sam crosses to the desk, pulls open the drawer, retrieves the spraypaint. He forces himself into a calm he doesn’t feel, even hums low under his breath for effect, as he carefully retraces the painted circles, zigs, and zags, filling in the disturbed portions, daubing the lines of the trap three or four inches wide in some spots to make sure the gaps are filled.

Bobby watches him in dead silence for a few minutes as he works, and when he speaks the old man’s voice is whisper thin. “You found him. Hiding out there. Tell me you found him, Sam.”

Sam doesn’t answer, clicks the cap back on the paint can, and he isn’t thinking, isn’t dotting the i’s, isn’t crossing the t’s, isn’t doing the math, isn’t joining the dots.

“He said yes,” Bobby chokes out then. “That fuckin’ idjit said yes.”

Sam ignores him some more, pushes up, nods in satisfaction at his handiwork, crosses over to the desk and puts the can back in the drawer, and he isn’t speculating, contemplating, meditating, ruminating, or hypothesizing.

Crowley is leaning on the doorjamb, watching, as quiet as they are, oddly respectful even, and he catches Sam’s eye, nods towards Castiel’s sprawled form. “You should move him further away from our friend in the chair,” he remarks. “It might not be safe for him to be up so close.”

Sam makes his way back to the trap, squats down and hauls the angel’s limp body further away from the slumped demon, touches his fingertips to Castiel’s neck, lays his hand on his brow. “His pulse is really weak,” he says. “And he’s burning up. I don’t think this is right, Bobby, I don’t think he should be this badly affected. He wasn’t before, when Dean used the sigil on him.”

There’s no reply, and when he looks up, Bobby is staring at him with empty eyes. “Bobby,” he says sharply. “We need to deal with this.” And he fucking  _wants_  to deal with this, he thinks, so he doesn’t have to deal with the rest of it.

It jolts the other man out of his shellshock. “Put him on my bed in the den,” he says quietly. “You know where the first aid kit is.”

Sam looks back down at the angel’s blood-drenched shirt, swallows. “I think we may have gone past first aid kit, Bobby,” he murmurs. “That’s a lot of blood.”

Bobby moves now, wheels himself laboriously over, looks down. “Maybe it’s just taking him longer to heal because he cut it into himself,” he says. “Or maybe it was too soon after Dean hit him with it.”

Sam scrubs a hand through his hair. “Do you think transfusing him is an option?” he asks. “If he keeps bleeding, I mean?”

The old man heaves out a weary sigh. “I have no idea, kid. He’s an angel, giving him our blood might mess with him big time. And we don’t know the vessel’s blood type… does he carry any ID that might say what it is?”

Sam pats the limp body down expertly, feels something approximately the right size in the inside pocket of the shredded trenchcoat, tugs it out, sighs as he flicks it open and sees a photo-booth shot of wide-eyed bewilderment staring back at him. “Agent Eddie Moscone,” he says. “It’s one of my fake FBI badges. Dean gave it to him when they were tracking Raphael. Cas must’ve hung onto it.” It’s like it breaks the spell to mention his brother’s name, and Sam suddenly feels sick, flops back on his butt, gasps out.

And Bobby must feel it too, because his hand is on Sam’s shoulder, gripping it tight. “What does it mean?” he rasps out. “Sam. What does it mean…?”

His voice trails off, and somewhere inside Sam knows the old man isn’t expecting an answer, isn’t waiting for one, because he knows what it means. Just like Sam does, even if he isn’t going there, even if he padlocked the door to _there_ closed and swallowed the key. And the way Bobby keeps his grip on him, holds onto him, is proof, because the old man’s hand is there to hold Sam together, to stop him from breaking into pieces.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Bobby,” Sam evades mechanically. “He’s Dean, he is. He’s my brother. He just – it’s a curse. That’s what it is.” He stares down at Castiel for a long moment, and the angel is ghostly white, navy blue shadows under his eyes, blood trickling from his nose and his mouth, and even his ears, and Sam hates himself for thinking it might even be a blessing to have this to focus on, to not have to sit and stare back at Castiel’s look of bleak horror and grief as well as Bobby’s. “Maybe it’ll be okay, maybe the blood doesn’t have to be typed and matched,” he ventures. “He’s an angel, maybe he can handle it. Maybe he just needs a boost or something.”

Crowley coughs from the doorway. “Well, you can’t give him yours,” he says succinctly. “It’s toxic to his kind.”

Sam chews his lip, looks up at Bobby again. “Let’s get him comfortable at least, patch him up,” he says firmly. “Dean is gonna be pissed when he shows up if he thinks we haven’t been taking care of him.” He maneuvers himself out from under Bobby’s hand, leans down, starts pulling the limp body up onto his shoulder.

“Sam? Sam Winchester?”

Sam freezes, twists his head to look at the demon in the chair, and it’s cocking its head, listening through the bag that conceals its face.

Crowley is sucking air in between his teeth over in the doorway, looks moderately apologetic. “Oops,” he says. “I forgot to mention that little detail.” He smirks. “Still. That’s what you get, working with a demon.”

Sam thinks he knows the voice, doesn’t want to believe he does though, and he lays Castiel back down on the floor, pushes up to his feet. “Does he know me?” he says slowly, suspiciously. “How does he know me?”

He tells himself it’s just the usual mouthy demon, like they all are, that it made a lucky guess because they all have his face and Dean’s committed to memory, and he knows the sonofabitch just heard him say Dean’s name and put two and two together, knows he has nothing to worry about even though his hackles are raising involuntarily, and alarm bells are ringing in his head because he thinks he knows the voice… doesn’t want to believe he does, though. 

“Sam, is that you?”

And he frowns, steps closer, no danger, the meatsuit is still bound and the trap is secure, and he reaches over, plucks the bag off the man’s head.

Brady always had perfect teeth, the perfect all-American-boy smile, the perfect Kennedy brother sideways cowlick swirl of hair that still looks artfully styled even though the back of his skull is caved in, and Sam towers above him, can see pasty pinkish globs caught in the strands at the back, can see the pale gleam of shattered bone.

He must have said the name out loud because the man smiles that perfect smile again, even wider. “Brady hasn’t been Brady in years,” he says mockingly. “Not since, oh… the middle of sophomore year?” He sighs, and it’s almost sympathetic, almost understanding, almost commiserating. “Poor Sammy had a devil on his shoulder even back then…” 

Sam is stock still as it sinks in, and the words creep out of him like they’re scared of what they might find, or of what might pounce on them as he opens his mouth, they crouch there on the tip of his tongue, peering out and looking this way and that. “But… you were my best friend,” he whispers, as the sounds finally pluck up the courage to cross the threshold of his lips into the danger zone. “You introduced me to Jess…” Golden, smiling, kind-eyed Jess, who was his future, and she dripped blood on him as she burned, and he hasn’t seen that image in his head for years now but there she is, floating above him and imploring him with her eyes as the flames halo around her, and her lips move soundlessly, and  _this can’t be_ , he’s thinking and now he can hear himself muttering it, in a monotone.

“Sam,” Bobby is saying, and the old man is rolling up beside him, gripping his forearm, and Brady is laughing up at him, all  _perfect fucking teeth_ , head thrown back and eyes squeezed shut with mirth, moisture trickling out of the corners. Sam isn’t aware of raising his hand to hold in the bile, but it’s pressed against his mouth all of a sudden, and then Crowley ranges up on his other side and nudges him.

“I’d clock him if I were you,” Crowley suggests amiably. “He can wait. It’s not as if he’s going anywhere now, and he’ll just distract you while you stitch up pretty-boy down there. Unless you need me to hold your hair for you while you puke?”

Sam swivels his head round, stares confusedly at the demon, hears a dull thud that has him swinging his gaze back around to the center of the trap. Brady is drooping in the chair again, and Bobby is right up behind him, holding a cast iron poker, his face crumpled with distaste as he looks down at the gray matter and hair clumped stickily on the tip.

“This can’t be,” Sam chokes out into the abrupt silence.

Bobby throws the weapon down, maneuvers himself alongside the unconscious demon, fishes inside his jacket and produces a wallet, flicks through the contents. “Brady’s his name,” he confirms quietly.

Crowley sniffs beside Sam, huffs out. “Well,” he declares, and he crosses to Bobby’s desk, roots out a piece of scrap paper and a pen. “Looks like friend Brady’s on the back burner until the big cahuna shows up.” He scribbles on the paper, wafts it at Bobby. “My cellphone number. Just give me a bell when he gets back, yes?” His attention is caught by papers scattered on Bobby’s desk, and he picks one up, takes out his phone, squints at the document in his hand as he thumbs in numbers. He looks up, smiles brightly. “I’ve put you in my contacts. If I don’t hear from you in the next twenty-four hours, I’ll be in touch. Just keep your moose off young Brady here until he gives us what we need, okay?”

Sam stands rooted to the spot, knows his mouth is hanging open, hears Bobby snort.

“What the fuck makes you think you’re welcome here?” the old man snaps. “Show your face again and I’ll blast you so full of rock salt you’ll be pissing Margaritas for a month.”

Crowley cocks his head, grins. “Negotiating a high level defection is a very delicate business,” he says. “You might need me. Besides. I’m invested.”

And then he isn’t there any more.

“Yeah, well hesitate to fuckin’ call,” Bobby growls at the empty space where the demon stood. He shakes his head, mutters under his breath before he wheels himself back past Sam. “He’s right, boy,” he says. “Whoever that is, we got other problems just now.” He sharpens his voice, his turn to prioritize now. “Sam.”

Sam tears his gaze away from the slumped demon, and Bobby is leaning over, reaching down, tapping Castiel’s cheek. He looks up.

“We need to help him, get him cleaned up. Before we do anything else.”

And Sam closes his eyes for a minute, breathes out his memories and his turmoil. Then he kneels down and heaves the angel up onto his shoulder, lurches out through the doorway, the earlier journey in reverse, only everything was different then and the world as he knows it hadn’t screeched to a halt, obliterating everything he held dear with its skid marks.

He finds he’s talking, babbling like he does when his brother is hurt, like Dean does when he’s hurt, doing it to steer his own mind sharp left of panic stations just as much as he does it to distract Dean from the discomfort, the usual crap droned out,  _just a few minutes more, get you lying flat, get you cleaned up, you need something for the pain?_ No reply, and Sam can feel damp seeping through his shirt, and he finally nudges up against Bobby’s bed and offloads his brother’s friend –  _their_  friend – down onto it. He catches his breath, crosses to the closet and heaves out Bobby’s first aid trunk, drags it across the floor so it’s right where they need it. Bobby is already busying himself at the foot end of the bed, pulling off Castiel’s shoes, and Sam stands and looks down, feels fucking awkward if he’s honest, and at least his unease is another distraction from his simmering anxiety.

“Well?” Bobby grates out, and Sam startles. “Get on with it,” the old man says gruffly. “I don’t want him bleeding out on my bed.”

Sam leans down, reaches out, stops with his hands hovering just above the sacked-out angel. He can feel Bobby’s eyes boring into him. “It’s just that he’s an angel,” he blurts out. “It’s – weird. To be stripping him. He only ever took the coat off when he was Jimmy. It’s like it’s welded on him or something.”

The old man nods. “I know what you mean, boy,” he says dryly. “Just watch out for the wings. Your brother told me he keeps them under there all folded up and when he undresses to put his PJs on, they spring up like a jack-in-the-box and knock everything flying.”

Sam snatches his hand back, gapes at the old man. “Is that tr—”

“Of course it isn’t fuckin’ true,” Bobby snaps, and his voice is strained and tight because his world has run off its tracks too, and Sam notices that his hands are shaking as moves them to the armrests of his chair, and he grips them tight, his fingers kneading into the vinyl.

“Okay,” Sam says. “Okay. Let’s do this.” He kneels down, scratches his head, blows out. “I’m gonna have to cut this off him,” he decides, and he slides his Bowie out of its ankle holster, slices through the tattered coat, drops pieces of it on the floor. “Can you pull the rest out from under him if I lift him up?”

Bobby wheels up beside him, grasps the fabric.

“On three. One. Two.” Sam braces. “Three.” He lifts, gets a chestful of bloody angel, the coppery tang of the red patches close up enough now to turn his stomach, and Dean and Castiel are about the same build, the same weight, and it’s such a visceral reminder of holding onto the barely contained slop that was his brother’s ruined corpse in New Harmony that Sam chokes.

He lays Castiel back down, swallows as he starts to peel the shirt away. And he remembers that he never closed Dean up after the hounds took him, too much damage, too ragged, too many slivers of muscle and flesh, the edges of the wounds frayed so they looked like the fringed hems on the denim cut-offs Jess used to wear, and if he’d tried to mend his brother Dean’s body would have looked like nothing so much as a cross stitch sampler. Sam suddenly imagines himself embroidering some hollow, meaningless blessing or bible saying into Cas,  _angels are watching over you_  or some crap like that.  _God is our refuge_ , or not, as the case may be, or maybe  _this is the day the Lord our God has fucking made, let us rejoice and be glad in it_.

Fingers click next to his ear.

“Are you gonna get this or not, Sam?” Bobby’s voice isn’t as sharp now, and he has gauze packets and antiseptic cream laid on a towel next to Castiel’s leg.

“I’ll get it,” Sam says wearily. He looks across at the old man, sighs.

“I know, son,” Bobby says quietly. “I know.” He sighs himself, narrows his eyes. “Why do you think the sigil didn’t work on him? It should have blasted him right out of here…” He reaches across Sam, finishes folding the shirt back off the wounds, blanches. “Jesus. It’s a fuckin’ mess…” He squints, tilts his head sideways as he stares down.

“I don’t know,” Sam ponders. “I haven’t even really thought about it.” And he knows why he hasn’t, knows that thinking too hard about it will inevitably lead to thinking about the fact the symbol did work on his brother. “He was behind me,” he offers. “And unconscious. Maybe they have to actually see it, see the light. Be exposed to it.” He blinks hard, moves it right along, examines the slashes more closely. “We thought he was just going to cut his hand, daub it on the wall or something. But he carved it into himself…”

The lacerations are puffy, seeping pus and serum, and spidery branch lines wander off at every angle, splitting into scarlet tendrils that swirl across Castiel’s torso like mile-a-minute vine covering a south-facing wall, and the skin from his sternum down to his pants is inflamed, blistered, raw.

“It looks burned on,” Sam murmurs. “The light must have seared it into him or something. Pass me the Bactine, I’ll have to slosh it on there.”

He soaks his hands first, then the wounds, parting some of the worse slashes to dribble the antiseptic in there, washing away the mess. He shakes his head. “This is pretty nasty, Bobby. Do you think he’ll feel it? Maybe we should give him something… he felt that hangover, Dean gave him some aspirin.”

“Do you know if he took it?”

“No, no idea, he just took off again.” It shouldn’t be infected, Sam is thinking.  _He’s an angel, he can heal himself_. “Dammit,” he says. “You know, I think if we held him up to the light, it would shine right through him…” He trails off.  _The light_ , he thinks. Glowing, and then Dean gone.

“I don’t know, kid. He must be fixing himself, surely?” Bobby considers it for a minute. “Putting something on him to stop the bleeding is one thing, but I’m loath to risk putting anything  _in_  him. It could do more harm than good.”

Sam chews his lip. “It took a whole liquor store to get him drunk,” he muses.

Bobby’s face is still creased in doubt. “I guess we could give him some antibiotics,” he says finally. “Justincasey. But I think we should hold off on anything stronger till he comes round.” He fusses over the gauze packs, mutters out an oath. “They should make spackle kits for this kind of thing,” he grumbles. “Those mesh patches you use to fill holes in the wall. Just slap the damn thing on him and spackle over the top. Problem solved.”

It’s a ludicrous enough image that Sam smiles weakly as he hefts his Bowie again, expertly cuts through the thin cotton of the shirt to get the rest of it off the angel while he works. And he freezes, the blade hovering in mid-air.

“Would you look at that…” Bobby murmurs softly.

Sam can’t help himself, reaches out to touch the raised welt on Castiel’s shoulder, the handprint an identical twin to the mark that still raises the hairs on the back of his neck when his brother emerges from the shower and he catches a glimpse of it in the few seconds before Dean self-consciously pulls on his tee.

“Jesus,” Bobby says suddenly. “Do you think he was in Hell?”

Sam shakes his head, helpless. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, Bobby.”

His fingers trace the mark, just barely, and he lines up his hand as best he can, upside down to it, measures its length, smaller than his, and he doesn’t see Castiel flail his own hand up, just feels it grip his wrist, tight. He sucks in breath, swivels his head, and Castiel is staring at him through bleary eyes, moving his lips, whispering something to him.

“Cas… What?” Sam leans in close enough to feel the angel’s breath warm against his cheek. “What? What happened to you?”

It’s drawn out, shaky, and so faint he can barely hear it. A name, and it makes Sam’s blood run cold in his veins. 

***

He doesn’t know where he is when he wakes up, only knows that he aches dully all over and that sharper pain is lancing up his neck from his shoulders, right into his brain. He cracks his eyelids and the sky is pale gray above him, and he groans out into the dawn, pushes himself up on his elbows, feels his stomach flip flop like a beached fish inside him. He winces, reaches his right hand back to rub at the muscle over his left shoulder blade, because it feels weirdly stiff, heavy, like something is dragging on it.

“Yep, it hurts when you lie on them for hours,” a voice says, out of the shadows. “Even if they don’t really exist in this dimension.”

He rockets up onto his ass, skitters himself backwards with his heels until his back hits something solid, and he pats frantically behind him,  _feels like rock_ , cold, hard, smooth in places, jagged in others, and he squints into the murk, makes out a shape that’s darker sitting over to his right. “What happened?” he croaks. “Where am I? And who the fuck are you?”

The shape chuckles. “Don’t you recognize me?” it teases. “I know I’ve been gone for a long time, but I never thought you’d forget, not really. You were always so good at taking care of your family.”

And something about it is familiar and right, but wrong, so damn  _wrong_ , and he swallows hard, palms his cheeks, shakes his head, feels the first hint of what might be appalled disbelief. “I don’t know you…” he whispers. “But. I  _do_. Something’s wrong.” He looks up then, up into the sky, can hear someone speaking in his head…  _of the air_ , the voice is saying. “Something’s wrong,” he says again, and he doesn’t know why he says it or what he means.

“Sensing a disturbance in the force, brother?” the voice replies softly.

Zachariah, he thinks wildly, and he babbles it out. “Is this 2014, is this Detroit? Did he, am I—” And then he stops as he registers what the shape said, feels a stab of terror at the memory of not-Sam’s velvety, patronizing voice, his fake concern, his promise. “Is this the garden? Am I in the garden again?” He can hear his voice break with his horror. “Sam? _Sammy _? And he leans forward, squints at the shape as it squats there, but there’s no bulk to it, and he shakes his head doubtfully. “No… you’re not my brother, you’re not him,” he mutters. “He’s bigger… wider. Much wider.”__

It laughs again, the shape, and he thinks he can make out its face looking up at the sky, its arms wrapped around its knees. “Wrong brother,” it mocks him gently.

“Wrong brother?” he echoes, and he knits his eyebrows together, tilts his head in a way he suspects might be just like Castiel does, because he’s picking up his brother’s habits as sure as his brother is picking up his, and then he shakes himself mentally because that thought didn’t come out right at all. And then he hits on something, can feel himself gape. “Adam…” he says, incredulous. “Is that you? How did you… where are we? What is this, are we—”

“Wrong brother,” it mocks him again.

There’s no malice in the voice, only an undercurrent of melancholy that twists in his heart like a knife. He feels something wet drip onto the back of his hand, and he reaches up, finds that tears are meandering down his cheeks. “I don’t have another brother,” he says softly, unconvincingly, because he doesn’t really believe it himself any more, knows he’s kidding himself, knows something is right there, that he’s standing on the precipice of it, a revelation, something huge, something world-shattering. And he skirts it, doesn’t want to go on to the new place, because that’s what this is, he knows it in his heart, knows that it will never be the same for him if he opens his mind to this. So he gives it one last shot. “This isn’t me,” he whispers, like he whispered to his brother before. “This isn’t happening.” Repress and deny, it’s his modus operandi after all, always has been. “It was conditional,” he chokes out desperately. “I got a do-over.”

“There are no do-overs,” the voice says sadly. “It  _is_  you, brother. It always was. Remember what I said? You were born to this.”

The shape stands, small, wiry, picks its way over to him, sits down beside him, and its warmth is familiar, comforting, and he remembers that it was a good, if mischievous brother.

“Gabriel,” he breathes.

The face beams, the first genuine, heartfelt smile he’s seen it wear on this plane of existence. Gabriel reaches up his hand, lays it on his cheek, tender, uses his thumb to smooth away the tears.

“It’s good to see you again, Michael.”

***

__  


  
Continued in chapter 2   


  



	2. Freaks Like Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers up to S6; AU after Point of No Return

Sam jolts awake to something,maybe Bobby’s jackhammer snoring from the couch, or Castiel’s confused rambling, or Brady’s intermittent yells from the other side of the house permeating through the balled-up strips of Kleenex he finally shoved in his ears at dark-thirty in an attempt to get some sleep, because even if his brother doesn’t need to catch up  _for whatever reason Sam doesn’t want to think about_ , he does, and fitful, restless dozing punctuated by nightmares is better than nothing.

It’s first light out, and the cold gray dawn is peeking in through the window. He reaches up his hand, kneads the back of his neck hard, circles his head slowly because the angle his head was lolling at has left him cramped and sore, feels the vertebrae crack in there. He yawns, sits forward and rolls his shoulders, groans out the ache, glances up at the drip Bobby rigged, and reaches out to press his palm to Castiel’s forehead, and the angel is staring back at him, blinking slowly.

“How are you doing, man?” Sam whispers, motions his head behind him. “Keep it down, Bobby’s sleeping. Bad night, you were pretty loud.”

Castiel furrows his brow, licks his lips. “What did I say?” he croaks, and he sounds almost suspicious, almost furtive.

Sam shakes his head. “No idea, Bobby thinks it was mostly Enochian. But it was pretty intense.” He pauses, leans in closer. “You’ve been burning a pretty nasty fever, Cas, and we can’t figure out why that is. Bobby rigged you up a drip, antibiotics, just in case. Is that okay? I mean – it won’t mess with you, will it?”

Castiel shakes his head slowly, drifts a distracted gaze around the room. “Where is…  _Dean?_ ” he says softly, and now his voice is laced with so much sheer unease it makes Sam’s gut tighten and his heart lurch, and when the angel looks back at Sam, his eyes are a plea.

“Uh.” He’s caught on his backfoot, trying to catch his balance, and he flounders for a few seconds. “He’s upstairs, crashed out,” he lies, badly he knows. “He was pretty tired after Van Nuys. And we had problems, we think he’s cursed.” And then, to change the subject, “Cas… were you in Hell?”

He stops there, almost brays out a laugh at the fact Hell is a safe topic for discussion, and that he might prefer to sit and listen to a litany of torture and abuse than look the angel in the eye and tell him he thinks his brother might be lost to them.

Castiel is frowning, thinking. “You think it’s a curse?” he whispers. His eyes are wider now, and they spark brighter, and for a second it’s so intense Sam can feel gooseflesh prickle his arms and an itch start up between his eyes, as if the angel’s stare is a LaserMax gunsight and its pulsating red light is burning right into the bridge of his nose.

And then the heat dies away, and Castiel shifts slightly on the bed, walks his hand ponderously up over the gauze dressings to his shoulder, to the mark, and rests it there, his eyes drifting half-lidded and his breath coming out in a faint sigh. It makes Sam shiver, because it’s something he’s noticed his brother do during his nightmares and he can’t count the times he’s reached out, half asleep, and placed Dean’s flailing hand there himself, because it comforts his brother, quiets him.

“Maybe you’re right,” Castiel murmurs. “But, maybe not.”

Sam swallows, finds the thought of an angel of the Lord strapped to a rack in the Pit is still easier than shooting the padlock off the door to  _there_. “Were you in Hell, Cas?” he says again. “Is that why you have the handprint?” But suddenly it’s not really a safe topic at all, because he finds he’s diving into it head first without a snorkel, and that he’s already out of his depth, searching for answers he doesn’t really think he wants to hear even if he knows he needs to. “How did you get out, Cas?” he says, low and urgent, right into the angel’s ear. “And you said his name. Why? Why did you say his name?”

Castiel smiles, and now Sam’s looking harder he can see that the spark in the angel’s eyes isn’t a spark at all, it’s tears. “Because he was gone for such a long time,” he breathes out. “And I missed him so much.”

His eyelids fold shut, and Sam reaches out, clicks his fingers just above his face. “Cas. Wake up,” he says urgently. “So you missed him, fine. But why did you say his name to me right then? Cas? How did you get out? I don’t understand…”

The angel’s eyes crack open again. “You will,” he sighs out. “You will, Sam.”

“But Cas—”

“I’m feeling pain…”

“We can fix that,” Sam races out. “We weren’t sure what to do, if you needed anything while you healed yourself. But Cas, why did you—”

“I’m not healing myself this time, Sam,” the other man whispers, and he winces. “It hurts. I feel sick. And I’m very thirsty.”

Sam pulls back, frowns. “But…  _why_  aren’t you? Healing yourself? I mean,  _why_  would you – feel sick, be thirsty, Cas, why aren’t you—”

There’s a noise, over at the door, and Sam whirls his head around as fast as his aching muscles will allow, and he’s already smiling, already starting to push up from the chair because there’s no one else it can possibly be, but his hopes tailspin, trailing smoke as they crash and burn.

“Gabriel,” he snaps, and he narrows his eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Sam. It’s good to see you too…” the angel says, around a crooked, insincere grin. “How goes your percentage of life?”

“How did you even find us? We have sigils, you shouldn’t be able to…” It dawns on Sam then, and he glances back at Castiel. “You’re tracking him,” he says. “Did you track him to Van Nuys? Have you been following us since then? Dean said he thought someone was watching us, have you been watching us, did you—”

Bobby is stirring, stretching out his arms and making phlegmy, congested sounds, and Gabriel rocks himself forward off the wall where he’s leaning, bends over the back of the couch, and touches his fingertips gently to the older man’s brow. “What? He looks like he could use the sleep,” he says defensively at Sam’s look, and he makes a face. “Sam, I’m going to give you some good advice. Reach up into your crack – gently now – and give those panties a little pull, you’ll feel much less cranky.” He smiles, slight and sly. “And yep, I’ve been tracking my brother since Van Nuys.”

Sam feels his brain shift back into gear, pushes up onto his feet, points behind him to the man on the bed. “What’s wrong with him? And can you help him?”

The angel shrugs, throws up his hands. “Castiel – slipped,” he announces, and he leans across to look past Sam. “Slipped and fell by the looks of things, kiddo.”

Sam doesn’t get it for a minute and then it hits home. “He _fell_? He’s  _fallen_?” he stutters out, as he gapes at the smaller man. And his mouth hangs slack and stupid for a few seconds while he stares dumbly, can’t wrap his mind around it even though they all knew Castiel was fading, even before the hangover from the black lagoon. And then he remembers what Bobby said. “The sigil didn’t work on him,” he breathes out.  

Gabriel smirks. “Yep. The fallen. Has anyone alerted Optimus Prime?” He cocks his head. “Come on, Sam,” he chides, and he  _tsks_  impatiently. “It can’t be a surprise. Castiel has been falling for a long time – ever since he started caring too much for your brother. He knew it. And it’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.” He flashes his teeth in a smile. “He’s toast, basically.”

Sam sits back down heavily, palms his cheeks. “He knew what would happen,” he murmurs. “He knew, and he still did it.” He looks up. “Where did he go?”

The angel studies him for a minute. “Castiel?” he says. “You mean Castiel?” He shakes his head, sucks in a breath. “He sinned,” he says, serious now at last. “Willingly. He rebelled willingly too.” He shrugs. “He has no means of propitiation.”

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. “Wait… a minute, slow down. I don’t – what does that even mean?”

Gabriel flaps a hand dismissively. “Oh, it’s all that religious crap,” he says brightly. “One of the myriad reasons I became a pagan. I’d much rather wear a crown of leaves and dance naked around an oak tree at midnight than read the bible.”

“But what does it  _mean_?” Sam repeats sharply.

“I see the sense of humor bypass worked,” the angel snarks. “What _ever_.”

“Look,” Sam says softly. “I’m at the end of myself. Please.”

Gabriel stares back at him for a moment, flicks his eyes to Castiel, exhales sharply. “It means that he can no longer appease or satisfy our Father,” he says, and his tone is suddenly somber, all traces of humor gone. “He has no atoning sacrifice to offer.”

Sam finds his hand is resting on his own shoulder, and he has no memory of placing it there. “So he went to Hell.”

Slow nod. “The Lake of Fire was created for the Devil and his angels.”

“He isn’t one of the Devil’s angels,” Sam says quietly, firmly.

Gabriel chuckles. “If we’re splitting hairs he isn’t an angel, _period_. Not any more.” He strolls over to Bobby’s desk, flits his fingers over books and documents, lifts the scrap of paper with Crowley’s number on it and snorts. “Watch this one,” he says confidentially, waving it at Sam. “Total conman. Even sweet talked me into buying a pair of wings from him once.”

It’s deflection worthy of his brother, and Sam grits his teeth, ignores it. “Can you help him?” he repeats.

Gabriel grimaces. “No can do, Sam. It would compromise my neutrality in all of this.”

“Neutrality?”

“Yep. Consider me Switzerland.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me,” Sam spits out. “He’s your  _brother_.”

The angel takes a few steps forward. “Screw you,” he grinds out, and his eyes flash as he stabs a finger at the bed. “He fell. That makes him unclean. Untouchable.”

Sam stands up again, steps forward himself, can feel his fingers clenching into fists, and he has a sudden memory of Uriel’s disgust for Anna, knows that’s what he’s seeing here. “Are you telling me you guys work to some kind of caste system?” he says, incredulous. “Besides,  _you_  fell.”

“That was different,” Gabriel hisses. “I didn’t betray my family. I just went undercover. Deep,  _deep_  undercover.”

“How? How is it different?” Sam demands. “You can paint it how you like, but you still bailed. And Cas is still your brother.”

There’s a long, strained silence.

“Look… he fell,” Gabriel says finally, and Sam thinks his voice might be tinged with regret. “It’s the worst thing any of us can do, and it means he isn’t my brother, not anymore. I can’t do anything for him, it isn’t permitted… it would be disobedience, and I’m not falling from grace for him.” His gaze drops away from Sam’s, and he crosses his arms in a gesture that looks suspiciously defensive. “Castiel knows how it works and he won’t take it personally, believe me. But I am sorry.”

And Sam knows it’s non-negotiable, and he turns back to the man lying on the bed, watches Castiel’s eyes scurry around hectically under his closed lids. “Will he dream about it?” he says suddenly. “Like Dean did?” And it matters to him, it matters to him that this angel, man, whatever he is now, won’t be destroyed by it like his brother was, might come out of it with no memory of what happened to him down there.

He feels that movement of air beside his ear that tells him the angel is right up behind him now.

“He was there before,” Gabriel says quietly. “He fought his way through Hell for forty years to find what he was searching for. He endured things you can’t even imagine. He survived it then.”

Sam chews his lip, has a clear memory of what Castiel said to him, the only reference the angel ever made to his incredible journey: that Hell was like an infection, that it made him feel remote from God and starved of His light. “That isn’t good enough,” he says. “Even if you won’t –  _can’t_  –heal him, can’t you take away his memories? So he won’t remember it?”

Gabriel snaps his fingers and in the stillness it sounds like a gunshot. And there in his hand is a bottle of water, and he dangles it down in front of Sam. “He said he was thirsty, didn’t he?” he offers neutrally. “You can help him with that. He said he was hurting. You can help him with that too.” He considers Sam for a minute, eyes shuttered. And then he trails a finger through the air a few inches above Castiel’s chest. “He’ll live,” he announces. “It looks worse than it is. He’s just not used to being this fragile.”

Sam takes the bottle, unscrews it. He leans over Castiel, lifts his head slightly, drips the water on his lips, and the other man’s eyes flicker open briefly and he gulps it down, chokes. “Easy,” Sam whispers. “Sips… sip it, man.” Castiel’s eyes drift closed again and Sam lays him back down.

Gabriel moves around Sam, parks his butt on the end of the bed. “Untouchable…” he remarks. “That wasn’t quite what I meant. It came out wrong.”

Sam snorts. “Surely not?” He puts the bottle of water on the floor just under the bed, shoves it to safety with his foot, heaves out the first aid kit and starts rooting through it, retrieves a syringe and the small brown bottle he’s seeking. He looks across briefly from drawing up the morphine. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

Gabriel meets his gaze steadily. “I could do that,” he concedes. “I could do what you ask. But here’s the thing, Sam. Castiel was given a gift down there, and I think he might want to keep a hold of it.”

Sam is rolling Castiel over, pulling up the man’s shorts. He buries the needle in his flank, tugs the blankets up again. “A gift? What could he possibly have—”

“Love,” Gabriel says softly. “Joy… peace, grace.” And he smiles. “He was gone for such a long time, Sam,” he echoes Castiel’s words, and his face is suddenly euphoric, his voice low and wistful. “And we all missed him… my brother, who was rain, hail, snow, thunder, lightning, who was fire, who was the Prince of Light. Who was like  _God_.” He sighs, and then he reaches out, almost reluctantly, pauses in mid-air for just a second before he takes a deep breath and then pats Castiel’s leg gently through the blanket, wincing as he does, almost like he thinks something will happen. “He saw that, at his time of greatest need. Our brother redeemed him… it was his heart’s desire, and I’m never taking it from him.” He looks Sam in the eye and his gaze is heavy with a meaning Sam isn’t sure he gets. “It might be all he has left.”

Sam swallows. “Cas said his name to me,” he mutters. “When he came back. And he said I’d understand. But I don’t…” He clenches his fists. “Was it him – was it  _Michael_  – who brought him back? Is that what you’re saying? Because that isn’t how it happened. Michael wasn’t there when Cas came back. He wasn’t there.”

Gabriel hooks his legs up and under him, settles himself comfortably on the bed. “That is how it happened, Sam,” he says gently. “Only an angel can pull someone out of the Pit. You know what it means. Michael was there. Standing right in front of you.”

Sam is fighting it, isn’t going to concede defeat, pushes that split second of thin air when Dean simply wasn’t there to the back of his mind. “But – it just can’t be, he can’t have—Dean wasn’t gone, he was there all the time. He wasn’t  _searching_ , for years, like Cas said he had to do.”

Gabriel shrugs. “This is Michael we’re talking about. The nuclear-powered kind of angel. Besides, they just didn’t bother hiding Castiel. He doesn’t matter in the scheme.”

Sam is breathing slow, staying calm even though his heart is beating at a rate of knots now, going for the record, and he feels like it might explode out of his chest. “But that isn’t what I saw happen,” he insists again, weakly now.

“Sam, Sam.” Gabriel sighs. “That is what you saw happen. It’s like I told you. Zachariah made a pretty big splat, I dropped by to check it out… and suddenly there he was. My brother. And I’ve been following him since Van Nuys.”

Sam looks up at him, back down to Castiel. “And he isn’t your brother anymore…”

“Are you finally getting it?” Gabriel says, not unkindly. “He isn’t why I’m here. I’m here because I’m returning something you misplaced.” He looks up at the ceiling. “Bathroom. He’s hiding. Maybe you can help him too.”

Sam hesitates for a heartbeat, and then stands up very slowly, and he feels hollowed out and empty. “How can I possibly help him?” he whispers.

Gabriel shrugs, waves him on. “Just. Go. Talk to him.”

He’s halfway up the hall when the archangel’s voice floats out after him.

“After all, you know what it’s like to find out you’re a freak, Sam.” 

***

There’s a moment in the upstairs hallway when Sam chokes out his brother’s name, and his knees buckle and he sags against the wall, presses his forearm up to his mouth and howls his anguish silently into his sleeve.

He slides down into an abyss of grief, and curls in on himself, fetal, his cheek pressed to the bare wood of the floor, because it hurts him, cramps in his gut. And in that moment he thinks wildly that he could turn and leave, walk out of this house and never look back, secure in his memories of  _Dean_ , of his brother, instead of whatever is hiding in the bathroom. And he wonders if that might be how Dean felt when Castiel beamed him to Maryland, wonders if Dean might have dreaded finding some monstrous facsimile of him, drunk on demon blood, humanity long gone.  _You still came_ , he thinks suddenly.  _You came for me, when you could have run the other way_.

He breathes himself through it, pushes himself onto his hands and knees, and up to his feet. Nausea has his mouth dripping brackish saliva, and he forces himself to swallow it down, rubs circles on his belly like his brother used to do when they were kids and Sam was sick,  _be fine Sammy, you’ll be fine, I’m right here, ain’t goin’ nowhere, you hear?_

He doesn’t flick on the light switch, he can see well enough in the pale sunlight shining in through the window.

Dean is sitting in the space between the bath and the sink, his knees bent, and he flicks his eyes up, reaches for the bottle of Wild Turkey he has parked next to him, gulps back several mouthfuls and wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

“I can’t get drunk,” he says softly. “I’ve been sitting here for a half-hour drinking to forget. Only I can’t get fuckin’ drunk any more.” He snorts out a hollow laugh, stares at the bottle, dregs now. “Fuck. It doesn’t even warm me inside.” And his arm flexes, almost too fast for Sam’s eyes to track, and he smashes the bottle down on the tile, where it explodes into glittering diamond-sharp fragments that skitter in all directions. He sniffs, considers the mess. “Man, Bobby’s gonna be pissed. It was his best liquor.”

Sam stands at the doorway, and he’s stock still, rigid, but his skin is tingling on the cusp of pain and inside he’s shaking, he’s like jelly quivering on a plate, can feel his bones, muscles, organs, blood cells, atoms, ricocheting off his skin in there, all bouncing about like they’re ping-pong balls in an air-mix lottery machine. He doesn’t know what he was expecting but it wasn’t this, he thinks, he didn’t think it would be this cruel, didn’t think it would rub his nose in his loss by parading a carbon copy of his brother in front of him, even down to the heavy drinking and harsh language. His mouth is so parched it feels like he toweled it down in there, and when he manages to speak the words are dust dry. “Please,” he whispers. “Please. Tell me. Tell me that you’re tired, that you need to sleep… it’s been going on thirty-six hours, you must be tired.”

Dean stares resolutely ahead, doesn’t react. His eyes are red-rimmed, and Sam thinks he might have been crying.

“Tell me that you’re thirsty… that you’re hungry,” Sam says, and he knows he’s pleading now, can hear it in his voice, that he’s begging. “Tell me your ribs hurt because Cas has a kick like a mule. Tell me,  _tell me_  – that you can’t hear them whispering to you, and that you can’t understand Enochian.” He can feel his eyes filling, and he knuckles away the moisture, sniffs snot back up and in. “Tell me you can’t smell demon on me,” he says. “Tell me you didn’t look into the light. Tell me you got a do-over, tell me it was conditional, _tell me_.” His voice is higher, panicked now, and he stops himself, takes a breath. “Tell me. Tell me who you are. Tell me  _what_  you are.”

For a long moment there is silence, and then Dean leans into his hand, rubs at his temples with his thumb and fingers. “I don’t know what I am,” he breathes out. “Or maybe I do, I don’t know. I do know I’m not – what I was. But I’m still  _who_ I was.” He peers up at Sam from behind his hand, and his eyes are unreadable. “Mary Campbell was my mother,” he says softly. “John Winchester was my father. Just like they were your mom and dad. They made me, just like they made you, and I was born into this family just like you were, Sam. And we were kids together, and I carried you out of the fire and I took care of you, I tried to keep you safe, tried my best. And you left, and I missed you. And you died, and I mourned you. And I went to Hell for you. So no matter  _what_  I am, we had that life, nothing can change it or wipe it out. I’m still your brother. That’s who I am. But. I’m him too.”

Sam stares back, mute. His insides have stopped spinning, and now they’re like lead, weighing him down so his feet are glued to the floor and he can’t move.

Dean waits for a minute, waits for him to say something, and then his eyebrows lower in a frown and he visibly stiffens, from his boots up, and Sam can see every single muscle lock tight. “Are you afraid of me, Sam?” he says, and now the look in his eyes is one Sam couldn’t describe if he tried, and his voice is raw, hopeless, angry. “Do you think I’ll  _smite_  you now I’m all juiced up on angel blood? And maybe take off out of here with Gabriel and leave you lying on the floor while I deal with my broth—” He pulls up short, blinks hard. “With Lucifer?” He falls quiet, shakes his head, drags a hand across his chin, and the silence is explosive, charged, like one single word will set it off.

“That was a cheap shot, Dean,” Sam whispers. “If that’s even still your name.”

Dean sighs out, and it’s heavy with despair. “Whatever.” He stares at the wall again. “You don’t have to be afraid of me, Sam.” And then, after a beat, and softer now, “I won’t hurt you. And that is still my name.” He slants his eyes up, and his expression is complicated now, twisted and tangled with meaning. “One of them, anyway. Like I said… I’m still your brother. And that was a cheap shot, Sam.”

Sam stares down, transfixed, flexes his fingers, and his woozy head and rubber legs finally give up the battle and fold him gracelessly down onto the floor, where his butt crunches on broken glass, and in the middle of it all he’s fairly sure he scrapes out his brother’s name.

“Watch yourself, Sammy,” Dean mutters. “I’m not putting my angelic magic healing fingers on your hairy ass.”

“Well, that’s fine, since I don’t want my hairy ass being touched by an angel anyway,” Sam trills out, his nerves making him ludicrously high pitched.

Dean’s eyebrows shoot up. “It’s not as bad as you make it sound,” he leers.

Sam gulps. “I don’t understand.”

“It isn’t complicated, Sam. Anna put her hands on there when I was—”

“Dean, for Christ’s sake,” Sam snaps, and he bites his tongue. “Fuck… sorry, I’m sorry. Blasphemy, cussing, gotta watch that now.” He knows his voice has an edge to it, honed by the mix of fear and grief that had him collapse outside the room. His belly still rolls queasily, and he slaps his hand there, rubs it into submission again.

“I’m a soldier,” his brother says quietly. “I’ve heard and said way worse than that in languages that don’t exist any more, believe me.”

There’s another eternally long moment of silence.

“That’s why you can read Enochian,” Sam mutters. “And that isn’t what I meant. And you know it.”

“Yeah, that’s why I can read Enochian. And yeah, I know that isn’t what you meant.”

“Are you really him?”

Dean looks at him sideways and Sam can see his brother formulating his approach, see him editing his words in his eyes as he starts to speak. “I’m him,” he says soberly. “He’s me. It’s always been that way, Sam. Remember what Gabriel said? About being born to it?”

The knot of tension starts to roil in Sam’s gut again, and he blinks, thinks it through. “Always,” he says. “I don’t understand. You mean you’ve always been the vessel, yes?”

Dean laughs and it’s hollow. “Not exactly,” he grates out. “In fact, in a way I did this to myself. By saying no. Can you believe that?” He leans forward, braces his forehead on his knees, stares down at the floor.

“You did it to yourself? By saying no?” Sam scrubs at his head in frustration. “Dean, I don’t get it. You’re gonna have to give me more, because I don’t understand what you mean, or anything that’s going on here, and I don’t—”

“No one’s seen Michael, right?” his brother cuts in. “Lucifer was popping into your dreams, but Michael was just awol.” He throws up his hands, shrugs. “He never made contact, never showed up in any burning bushes, never flew down to knock skulls when Zachariah was busy giving his vessel stomach cancer. Cas just said he was keeping a low profile. Jesus.” He sounds exhausted, even though Sam knows he’ll never feel tired again, and he shakes his head. “But then suddenly there he was,” he continues flatly. “Right out of the blue, in nineteen seventy eight. In the flesh. So to speak.” He glances over at Sam, and his expression is opaque. “You know how many years Michael was off the radar?” he asks, and he doesn’t wait for Sam’s answer. “Roughly three thousand seven hundred.”

Sam is trying to follow his brother’s rambling, can’t figure out where he’s going with this at all, and he stares helplessly back. “I still don’t get it. Where is this leading to?”

Dean smiles weakly. “That’s roughly three thousand seven hundred Heaven years. Because in Heaven, time moves like it does in Hell.” He raises an eyebrow. “You know how many earth years Michael disappeared for?”

And Sam starts doing the math, long, long,  _long_  division, and somehow it’s slotting into place, starting to sound logical even though it isn’t in the same county, the same state, the same continent as logic, even though it’s pulling everything he thought he ever knew out from under him and tearing it into shreds in front of his eyes while it laughs in his face. “Roughly thirty-one,” he breathes out. “Fuck. Michael fell… and then he was born. Like Ann—”

The atmosphere is suddenly as incendiary as it was a few minutes before, and it feels like a physical thing and he stops abruptly, because Dean is staring at him, and his eyes are brilliant.

“Let’s get one thing straight here, Sam,” he says slowly, carefully, like he’s saying it once and once only, and Sam better commit it to memory or else. “I never fell. I wasn’t banished, or exiled. I never disobeyed, and I never rebelled. Don’t you ever, _ever_ set me down at the same level as my brother, because what he did… it’s unforgivable sin, and he is not forgiven in this age or the age to come.” He’s calm, breathing steadily, and he turns to face the wall opposite him again. “Is that clear?”

As crystal, Sam thinks, because suddenly he’s lost for words, and he’s flipping to what Gabriel said about Castiel’s memory of Michael,  _it might be all he has left_ , and maybe he’s finally decoding the message that was in the other angel’s eyes. And it’s another thing he just doesn’t even want to think about, so he files it under pending and slams the desk drawer of his mind closed, and when his eyes flick back to Dean his brother’s expression is somehow knowing. Jesus, he thinks, he never has been really sure if they can read minds.

“We never saw him, I never dreamed him, because he was already me,” Dean continues after a beat. “Anna went back to kill our parents, and it changed everything because he was sent back too.” He barks out a sudden laugh. “It’s like the Terminator or something. He was sent back to protect me, to protect their glorious leader, their fuckin’ Michael sword. And Mom was pregnant. And then I was born. Like you said.” He shakes his head, seems miles away from Sam all of a sudden. “Fuck,” he mutters. “Fuck. If I had just said yes before she went back… before she changed it all.  _Fuck_.” He shoots upright, erupts into a frenzy of punching the wall, and Sam can hear the tile cracking, hear chunks of it fall down, and he flinches at the force. And finally Dean stops, holds his hand out in front of him and examines his knuckles. “That didn’t hurt at all,” he says, and his voice is dreamy, awestruck. “It could come in useful.”

“Can you fly too?” Sam blurts out, with a lack of diplomacy that surprises even him, because for a second he remembers honeybees and how his brother stared up at the sky when he told him what Ruby said. Because he was Michael, he was _of the air_ , and they didn’t even know it.

“I believe I can,” Dean says softly. “I believe I can fly, Sam. I believe I can touch the sky. I think about it every night and day—”

Sam goggles at him. “R Kelly? Seriously?”

Dean sits down on the toilet seat, smiles, barely. “Perils of knowing it all, Sam. What’s your excuse?”

Sam swallows thickly. “Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

“Dean…” He shifts, moves to push up, needs to put a hand on his brother, needs to feel flesh and blood, and warmth, a heartbeat, contact.

And Dean’s face falls and he recoils, almost jumps out of his skin, and his hands are up, palms out. “Don’t, Sam. Just – _no_. I can’t do that.”

Sam swallows back acrid disappointment. “Because you can smell her on me,” he whispers. “Smell the Pit on me.”

Dean smiles a brittle smile, doesn’t deny it. “You want to talk about our feelings don’t you?” he says distantly. “Well. I’m not even close to dealing with this. And neither are you. Maybe we’ll get there, but for now you know damn well I’m doing what I always do, and just pretending it isn’t there.” His eyes harden. “And maybe you should too, because we have work to do. We need to get Pestilence, get his ring.”

It hangs there between them, and finally Sam leans back, plants one hand on the floor beside him, winces at the sting of glass and snatches his hand back, examines his palm.

“Don’t cut yourself on that,” Dean says. “Though I guess I could just heal you if you did. You know, since it isn’t your hairy ass.”

Sam presses his hand up to his mouth, sucks the bead of blood at the base of his thumb. “It’s just a scratch,” he mumbles, and then he remembers something, shakes his head ruefully. “That poor old guy and his arthritis,” he says. “I guess you really could have fixed his hip, made the pain—”

And he stops abruptly, because Dean is exploding up on to his feet again, skirting past him, and Sam can already hear the clatter of boots on the stairs. He pushes up himself, follows in his brother’s wake, and there Dean is, and he’s kneeling down next to the couch, shaking Bobby awake.

The old man is blinking frowsily, rubbing at his eyes, and his face lights up. “Dean! Dammit, boy, it’s good to—”

And Dean is beaming up at him, megawatts blazing, and he’s putting his hands on Bobby’s legs, and he’s telling him  _yes_ , he really can walk again.

***

Dean sits on the porch swingand watches them, Sam leaning on the Impala, gesturing crazily and shaking his head every so often as he talks, and Bobby pacing, stamping, jogging up and down in front of him. Every so often the old man leans forward slightly, kneads at his thigh muscles, and as he straightens up he wavers slightly and Sam catches him under the arm to steady him. And Bobby pulls off his cap, rubs his sleeve across his eyes, glances over at him. He stares back, and Bobby’s gaze is unreadable. After a moment the old man casts his eyes away, down and to the side.

He contemplates hauling ass over there to pass the time of day with them, but instead he closes his eyes, wonders what it might be like to see the bright side. So he does, and he savors it for the first time: the feeling of completeness, of having come home. It sparks inside him, floods him, melts across and over him, a whole-body rush of joy and satisfaction that screams  _at fuckin’ last_  inside his head, combined with a gentler contentment and warmth that has him sighing into the knowledge that this is  _it_ , this is what was missing all along, this brilliant glow inside him. And it makes him worthy, might even make him into someone who deserved to be saved.

He finds himself gazing over at his brother and his old friend again, wonders if he might be able to find the words to tell them that this is his natural state, what he was meant to be, what he’s  _for_ , the words to ask them to celebrate it with him and share his elation. He pushes up to his feet, smiles as he starts walking towards them, but Sam’s face is impassive and Bobby’s is drawn and gray, and they don’t smile back, don’t say anything as Dean draws up alongside them.

He stands there, feels awkward, feels like the fifth fuckin’ wheel if he’s honest. “How does it feel to have your getaway sticks back?” he says with forced cheer, and then, after a moment of flat, dead, goodwill-sucking silence, “Bobby, you’re making me feel like a spare dick at a wedding.”

“Can you blame him?” Sam says quietly. “It makes no sense.”

“Him walking again makes perfect sense to me,” Dean challenges.

“That isn’t what I was talking about,” his brother replies meaningfully. “ _Michael_.”

Dean frowns. “Oh. That. Well – in a way it does. Make sense, I mean. If you think of it in terms of multiple universe theory.”

Sam goggles then, and Bobby might too, the first real reaction he’s seen from the old man in the half hour since he hauled him upright and Bobby gasped and staggered out ahead of them into the early morning on shaking legs, silent with shock.

“I’m cursed, remember? I know everything,” Dean jokes weakly.

His brother frowns. “Are you? Were you? Cursed, I mean. Can an archangel even be cursed? Only maybe it was…” He throws up his hands. “This. The whole Michael thing. Maybe that’s why you know everything.”

Dean considers. “I don’t know. There was definitely something off about that kid in the car.” He drifts as it preys on his mind again. “She had barbecue eyes.” He nods to himself in affirmation, looks up to see two baffled expressions staring back.

“Barbecue eyes?” Sam queries.

“That movie, remember? About those zombie mutants who wait year round for some poor sap to wander in off the highway and then make him the main course at the annual town barbecue.” He shudders. “She had barbecue eyes. Like Missy Bender. And there was something she was doing…” He stops, because it’s just there but still out of reach. “If I ever sleep again, it’ll probably wake me up in the small hours,” he quips.

Sam doesn’t even smile, just stares back unblinkingly, and Dean clears his throat, feels oddly self-conscious under the scrutiny. “Are my wings stickin’ out or something?” he says.

Still nothing, and Bobby is staring too.

“Come on,” he demands. “That was a little funny.”

And Sam is still all silent appraisal, skepticism mixed with confused fascination, his mouth a thin, tense line.

“Anyhoo,” Dean continues uncomfortably, “multiple universes are all parallel, but if you go back in time the universe you’re in starts to change, diverge… so it isn’t parallel any more. Ours veered off a true line because I – because  _Michael_  – stayed, and when we came back it was all different. We didn’t come back to our original universe, we couldn’t. Because he changed the now when he stayed. Do you see?”

Sam finally blinks, and his expression shifts up a gear from curious to quizzical. “So… now we’re stuck moving forwards into the future as it is in this universe?”

“Yep. All that running, fighting – it meant nothing. Because in this universe, I’m him. I’ve always been him.” He shakes his head. “I might as well have said yes on day one. Jesus.”

Sam stands, paces much as Bobby had been doing, scrubs at his head. “But – you weren’t, I – Dean, I can’t take this in at all. And I know what you said about how you’re still you even though you’re him. But – I remember a time when you _weren’t_  him. And if I do, then so do you.”

Dean stares back at his brother, and Sam’s face is earnest, and he’s looking for assurances, agreement, approval, and it’s pointless, because it’s too late. “Get it through your head, Sam,” he says bluntly. “As it stands now, there has never been a time when I wasn’t him.”

Bobby exhales sharply. “I wiped your ass when you were a kid,” he rasps painfully, like the words are being ripped out of him. “I helped you learn your letters, helped you learn to write your name, a good, short name, easy for a little boy to learn to write—”

“Dean means church official,” he cuts in acidly. “Did you know that? Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, huh?”

Sam throws him a warning look, flares his nostrils dramatically, and he buttons it.

“I held onto you after your nightmares, and you held onto me,” Bobby continues, almost like he never spoke, because Bobby is miles away, in another time and place. “I waited near on two damn months for you to say a single word to me after your dad first dropped you here. I’ve picked you up, held you up, mopped you up, and stitched you up. So don’t you stand there and have the fuckin’ nerve to tell me that was never you, Dean. It  _was_.” The old man clenches his fists, and his voice is ragged, breathless. “Now unless you’re gonna say something worth hearing, don’t bother talking to me for a while.”

Dean feels his joy fading, slipping away through his fingers, feels his luster tarnish to dull monochrome, and he bristles. “I never said that wasn’t me,” he says roughly. “I said it was him too. You weren’t listening.” He stabs a finger out, down, towards Bobby’s boots. “You got your legs back. Mister Tibbs, too, so no more pissing through a tube. You can walk, instead of sitting here spinning your wheels. You can be useful in this fight again, just like you wanted. You can stop wearing a bullet in your pocket and being a whiny fuckin’ princess. All of that’s worth hearing. Isn’t it?”

Bobby almost lunges forward, loses his balance and reels back against the car. “It isn’t worth this,” he hisses, and his eyes are already watering.

The disappointment doesn’t reach crushing levels but Dean’s chest feels tight suddenly, and his mouth goes dry. “It’s worth it to  _me_ ,” he snarls. “If you walking again is the one good thing that comes from this, it’ll be worth it to me. But.” He waves a hand dismissively. “Whatever the fuck you say, old man.”

He turns, walks back towards the house, thinks it damn well might be exactly the right moment to holy waterboard what he needs to know out of Crowley’s package, and he hears his brother’s feet thudding on the dirt as he jogs up behind him.

“Dean, wait a minute.” Sam grinds to a halt next to him. “I’ll talk to him. He’s in shock. You know that’s what this is, don’t you?”

He ignores Sam, keeps walking, until his brother catches up to him again and grasps his upper arm, swings him round. A flare of revulsion sparks in his gut,  _Lucifer_ , and he flinches, jerks the limb out of Sam’s grip.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Sam races out. “Off limits… I forgot.” His expression is crestfallen, and he pushes his hands into his pockets like he doesn’t trust himself not to reach out. “He doesn’t mean it, Dean. And anyway, there’s something you need to know…”

Dean doesn’t wait for his brother to continue, just puts it out there. “I can’t help it. It’s like you set alarm bells ringing inside me. Or something.” He shrugs, lies. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’ll wear off… you don’t smell so bad now.” He grimaces. “I meant the sulfur. That didn’t come out right.”

“It’s okay,” Sam says quietly. “We’re all in shock, Dean. You too.”

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Maybe I’m just – hyperaware or something.”

“Maybe,” Sam echoes. “But listen, Dean, there’s something you need to know about Cas, he—”

“I know,” he cuts in dispassionately. “I know about him. What are you giving him?”

Sam flounders for a second, squints. “What… are we  _giving_ him?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, briskly, businesslike. “Meds. What’s he on?”

His brother frowns back at him. “Uh… Bobby set up a fluid drip, antibiotics, and he’s on morphine for the—”

“No.” He raps it out like the order it damn well is, slices his hand through the air for emphasis. “Absolutely, categorically, _no_. Nothing stronger than aspirin. I mean it, Sam. I want him off that crap, and I have my reasons. If he’s hurting, give him a belt to chew on.” He exhales long and loud. “And now we have a demon to haze.” He starts towards the house again, hears Sam behind him, aghast, disbelieving, stumbling through the words.

“My God… you’re not going to help him, are you?” And then Sam whirlwinds around in front of him, crowds into him. “Are you going to feed me the same line Gabriel did?” he’s asking, and he’s pink with anger, almost shaking with it. “That he’s _untouchable_? This is Cas, for Christ’s sake… don’t do that to him, it’ll – I thought you and him had some sort of—”

“You don’t know a damn thing about me and him,” Dean interrupts icily. “He wouldn’t expect it of me. And he’d never ask for it either.”

And he maneuvers around and away from his brother, keeps walking, up the steps and into the house.

***

Sam schleps back over to Bobby, sits up on the hood of the car, even puts his boots up on her skin, wonders if Michael considers her his baby, like Dean does.

“Multiple universes, my ass,” Bobby grouses beside him. “Space, the final fuckin’ frontier. It’s a bunch of crap. He’s cursed. That’s what it is. We need to knock him out, tie him up, and start driving back to Heber, hunt that skeevy little—”

“Actually they did do it on Star Trek,” Sam ventures absentmindedly. He jumps alert to a sharp dig in his ribs. “Ow.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Bobby snaps.

Sam rubs at his side. “Star Trek,” he mumbles. “The transporter malfunctions, sends Kirk, Bones, Scotty and Uhura to a mirror universe with an evil Spock.” He floats a hand up to his face, pats at his chin, wilting as Bobby flattens him with a look. “Evil Spock, he, uh… wears a goatee.”

“You don’t say.”

“Dean loves that episode.”

They both fall quiet for a second before Bobby leans forward, starts rubbing his thighs again.

“They feel okay?” Sam ventures cautiously. “I mean, I know you said—”

“They feel fuckin’ awesome,” Bobby mutters. “I’ve dreamed of this, boy.” He presses two fingers to the space between his eyebrows and rubs at it. “I’ve woken up in the mornings full sure I’m just gonna swing my legs over the side of the bed and tap dance my way downstairs.” He looks at Sam then, and his eyes are shifty. “I’ve made deals,” he says hoarsely. “No, not demon deals,” he hurries out at Sam’s wince. “Deals in my head. With God. So help me, Sam, I’ve laid there in my bed every single night since this happened and I’ve told the man upstairs I would give anything.  _Anything_. But this business with him?” He motions to the house. “It makes me feel like I’d give anything to be stuck in the damn chair again if it changed things back.”

Sam chooses his words carefully. “You don’t have to be guilty about walking again, Bobby. This isn’t anything you did… it didn’t happen because of any deal you think you might have made with God.” He hesitates for a beat. “And it’s true, what he said. He’s still Dean. It’s weird… I mean. Cas and Jimmy were totally different. Maybe it’s the difference between being a vessel and actually being one of them, like –  _fallen_. Or whatever he is. Maybe it’s the fact he was  _born_. Anna, she was normal too.” He grimaces. “Until she went Glenn Close.”

Bobby is scuffing patterns in the dust now with his boot, swirls and streaks, can’t seem to stop moving his legs. “I wonder how they do that?” he muses. “Get born, I mean. I thought they needed permission. Must be different when they fall, I guess.” The old man steps forward, large steps, twirls around on the spot.

“Don’t say anything to him about falling,” Sam cautions. “It’s like their version of original sin or something.” The sun is getting stronger, beating down more warmly now, and he slides off the Impala, shrugs off his jacket.

“Yeah, I got that from the words you were having with him,” Bobby replies. “He won’t fix Castiel?”

Sam  _tsks_  in frustration. “From what Gabriel said, it’s more like can’t. The whole fallen thing makes it  _verboten_.”

The old man furrows his brow. “That don’t make much sense given he pulled him out of there. I mean – he must  _matter_ still, for him to do that.”

Sam chews on his lip for a minute. “Yeah. It’s weird…” he murmurs. “Anyway, Gabriel says it looks worse than it is. Cas, I mean. Said he just wasn’t used to being fragile. Being _human_.”

Bobby rat-tat-tats his fingers on the car. “So Castiel fell,” he muses. “I guess he’s a real boy now. Just when we needed the mojo.” He scratches at his beard, frowns. “That said, I guess Michael packs more volts.”

Sam scowls at that. “He wants Cas off the morphine,” he says after a minute.

“Why’s that?”

“No clue… he just said he has his reasons. So just aspirin from now on.”

Bobby sighs. “Guess we should do as he says. Given his new super powers and the whole  _smiting_  deal.”

“He isn’t going to smite us, Bobby.”

They sit quietly for a couple of minutes, until Bobby gives Sam a sideways glance. “What do you think is gonna happen?” he says then, tentatively. “Only Dean said these guys leave the vessel pretty bad off when they beam out, told me Raphael fried that guy up in Waterville’s brain to a crisp.”

Sam shakes his head. “Man… I don’t know, Bobby. When we went back to the past, Michael told him he’d leave him in one piece. But this – this whole  _not-vessel_  thing. I don’t know, maybe it means he’s in there for good.” And he feels the knot of tension start twisting his gut again, feels his eyes sting, his breathing speed up, and he shivers at the thought. “This, all of it – it’s unreal,” he mumbles. “My brother is… he’s – I just  _can’t_. I can’t even begin to process this, I don’t know how to, what to—”

A hand pats his shoulder suddenly, clamps down, fingers squeezing tight for a second, so many unspoken words in the gesture. “You gonna be okay putting the screws on this demon?” Bobby says.

He flicks his eyes over at the old man, snickers despite himself. “Given the circumstances, I think Brady’s gonna be the comic relief.”

***

Dean stops outside the den, gazes in at the figure on the bed for a long moment, before he ventures inside the room and closer, slowly. “Wake up,” he murmurs. “Please. Cas. I need to talk to you. Come on, I know you’re faking it.”

Close up he can feel his skin crawl like there are insects swarming under it, feels a distaste, a disgust, that he has to swallow back down. He reaches out and hovers his hand just over Castiel’s face for a second, feels something there, some sort of buzz, an aura. He has to fight the urge to snatch his hand back as he pushes through the invisible barrier and lays it cautiously on Castiel’s brow, and he has to take deep breaths as he does, because his brother’s fall drills into his heart and his soul. He rests his hand there for a second, gentle, pushes the hair back, fists it there on top, and scowls. “You fuckin’ idiot,” he breathes out. “Why did you do that? It was unbelievably stupid. Why did you have to go and do that?”

“Michael.”

Dean always did get that frisson of something, maybe static dancing just over the surface of his skin, a split second before Castiel materialized. But that was before, that was _then_ , and this is now, and it’s magnified ten-fold, so that his brother’s presence sings through his whole body like he’s a living, breathing tuning fork, and his whole being resonates with vibrational energy, pure tone. He doesn’t turn around. “That isn’t my name,” he says softly.

“It is to me, brother,” Gabriel says, right behind him now. “And what you’re thinking of doing is disobedience. You can’t fix him any more than you did when you pulled him out, and you took a big enough risk doing that. When news reaches—”

He cuts in, bitter. “I’m not going to fix him, Gabriel, don’t worry. You know it isn’t that bad anyway. And God left the building, didn’t you hear? We can be free agents now.”

Gabriel’s tone is careful. “Free will, Michael?” He raises an eyebrow. “It’s a slippery slope. You get too close to the edge and…” He trails off.

“And what? I fall?”

“It gets noticed.”

Dean laughs, and it’s sour. “By who? I went home, and it turns out our Father is off playing fuckin’ golf or something.” He glances back now. “I really don’t think he’s going to leave off hitting balls with a stick to chastise me for redeeming one of his grunts.”

Gabriel doesn’t blink. “You can’t take risks like that. You have to stop him. That’s why you’re here.”

“That’s rich, given you have no intention of choosing sides,” Dean fires back. “Or of helping me. Too much like free will, huh?” He snorts derisively, turns back to stare down at the still face again for a moment. “You must’ve been tuning into angel radio all these years, Gabriel,” he says tightly. “Did Castiel know? Did he know who I was? All along?”

“It’s one of the reasons why he was sent there to get you,” his brother replies neutrally. “Why they were all sent. But I doubt if he knew. You were the Righteous Man, the only one who could stop it. That’s as much as the grunts were told.”

Dean keeps staring down, and finally Gabriel nudges him gently with his elbow. “You know it’s the truth,” he admonishes. “He’s been trying to keep you as far away from _you_  as he could. Sigils, remember? He fought his way through Hell to get to Dean Winchester. Not Michael. He’s been fighting for Dean Winchester ever since. And he fell from grace for Dean Winchester. For what it’s worth.”

And it  _is_  worth something, it  _does_  matter.

He sifts through his vocabulary for words that might be even remotely suitable, finds none, spins on his heel and strides out of the room, up the hallway and into the kitchen. He stops in front of the window and tracks Sam and Bobby, just now walking back towards the house, Sam trotting up the steps and Bobby taking it slower, savoring each step, placing each foot solidly on the ground, staring down at his boots as he does. _Team Free Will_ , he thinks suddenly. “Us,” he backtracks then, glancing back over his shoulder at his brother. “You have no intention of helping  _us_.”

Gabriel’s regret emanates out from him in waves, engulfs Dean’s mind like a tsunami, crashes over him, churning remorse and contrition like flotsam, and he groans, doubles over, has to press his hand up to his brow. “Fuck, Gabriel… turn it down. Lower, it’s too much…”

His brother reins it back, puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’re rusty, Michael.”

“And you’re loud,” Dean grouses, and he flips back to a memory, hospital, Cas, hive mind, the Borg. “I thought I could access all that collective crap at will. I didn’t think it was fuckin’ mandatory… like, all the damn time.”

Gabriel’s face splits in an amused grin. “You still blaspheme like you’re bunked down in the barracks, Michael,” he says, shaking his head. “You’ll be tuning it out in no time. And besides…” He trails off, his attention caught by movement at the door.

Dean tracks his gaze, and Sam is there now, skirting around him, giving him a wide berth, and Bobby is standing in the doorway, his face pale and strained tight with stress, and he’s tapping his toe frantically on the floor. “Bobby,” he throws out testily. “Sit down, before you fall down.”

The old man’s eyes widen. “I’m never sitting down again,” he mutters.

Gabriel taps his shoulder now. “Pay attention to me, Michael,” he says. “Me-me-me. And listen.” He cocks his head.

Dean concentrates, squints for emphasis, ignores the filthy look Sam fires at the smaller man as the name trips off Gabriel’s tongue. “Listen to what?” he finally says, exasperated.

“Exactly!” Gabriel exclaims in triumph, and he folds his arms in smug satisfaction. “We’re leaving,” he says.

“Oh yeah?” he retorts. “And where are we going?”

Gabriel rolls his eyes dramatically. “Not we-we.  _We_. We’re leaving.” He flaps his hands up in the air. “We can’t hear us.”

From his spot at the doorway, Bobby grinds out a muffled oath, and his face is like thunder when they all swing their heads around to look at him. “Well,” he barks. “Do any of these idjits ever tell it like it is?  _Ever_? Speakin’ in fuckin’ riddles like—” He jerks his head backwards, motions up the hallway to the den. “The other one.”

Gabriel cackles. “Well riddle me this, old man,” he taunts. “It has no top or bottom, but it can hold flesh, bones and blood all at the same time—”

“Gabriel,” Dean cuts in. “That’s enough.”

“But Michael, I’m giving you a clue.”

“Golly, thanks Baloo,” Dean growls. He remembers this on some level, his brother’s uncanny ability to wind him up, and he sharpens his voice. “Enough, I said.”

He circles his shoulders stiffly, because he still can’t get used to the feeling of heaviness there, and he suddenly thinks of not-John Winchester, his level, reasonable tones, his deadpan calm, his conviction,  _you can’t fight city hall_. “I have no sense of humor, do I?” he sighs out as it dawns on him. “It’s all riddles, just like the man said, because this is one of your pranks. And I’m the humorless one. That’s what this is, isn’t it? I’m the uncool one, the straight man, the Zeppo, the one with no sense of adventure, the one who never has any fun. I’m the designated fuckin’ driver. The  _hammer_. That’s what this is.”

Gabriel smirks. “Like I said, you’re just rusty. It’ll take a while, but you’ll be back on the horse in no time, bro.” He puts a hand behind his ear. “I mean  _we_. The angels. _Us_.” He waves at the air between them. “You can’t hear us whispering now, can you? Or not as loudly, anyhoo.”

Dean glances over to Sam, watching the verbal jousting from where he’s leaning up against the kitchen table, and Sam raises an eyebrow. “Whispering pines.”

Dean nods in reply, and hell, it’s true. The whispering, the whooshing, it’s barely there now, it’s far off fields of corn rustling in the breeze. “It was us I could hear,” he breathes. “Angel radio.”

“But not so much now,” Gabriel says. “It’s fainter, not so many of us. Because we’re leaving. When you said yes, when you acknowledged who you are, when you opened yourself up to taking back your grace and destroyed Zach—”

Sam chips in, his voice stuttering slightly. “The light,” he says. “In the green room, the light. It wasn’t just Zachariah dying was it? It was Michael…”

“Give that man a kewpie doll! It was a portent—”

“Please tell me I didn’t have a grace tree,” Dean cuts in morosely. “That was just so many levels of fuckin’ stupid. And there was no  _opening up_  of any kind.”

Gabriel rolls his eyes. “It was a portent,” he repeats. “And it went out on the bush telegraph the second it happened. Why do you think Crowley showed up here?” He pauses a beat, sighs. “And now we’re all going home, to wait it out. Wait for the reckoning. It’s the end times, Michael.”

Bobby clears his throat harshly. “At that time, Michael, the great prince who protects the people, will arise,” he says. “Canonical New Testament.”

Dean rolls his eyes, and now they’re all looking at him, expectant, like they think he’s going to offer them solutions, like it’s all arbitrary, like it’s coincidence, like none of it is premeditated at all, and it’s all he can do not to laugh at them and tell them not to waste his time, because—

“It doesn’t have to be that way, Michael,” Gabriel cuts in quietly, reading every unspoken word he just uttered in his head.

He’s just as calm and impassive himself. “Oh? How’s that, Gabriel? And while we’re on topic,  _why_  is that?” He takes a step forward. “It’s what you want. Isn’t it? Isn’t that what you told me? You just want it to be over.”

His brother swallows, uncomfortable now. “That’s what I told _him_.”

Dean shakes his head, laughs. “Come on,” he scoffs. “There is no him, you know that. There never really was, not in this reality. There’s only me. So don’t go playing the Dean Winchester card now, brother. And don’t try and kid us that you care who wins.”

Gabriel looks shifty, sidles a few feet away from him. “I do care… I, uh. Changed my mind,” he bleats. “I like people. I like Sam and Dean. And… there might be another option.”

Dean cocks his head, confused. “Another option?”

His brother stares back, purses his lips. “Come on, Michael,” he says harshly. “I’ve given you the means of figuring it out.” He taps his temple. “It’s in there. And I’ve given you a clue. It has no top or bottom, but it can hold—”

“Fuck it, why can’t you just tell us?” Sam barks from the other side of the room. “If you like people, if there’s a way to save us from this shitstorm, why can’t you just man up and make the right choice? Castiel did.”

“That was free will, Sam,” Dean interjects witheringly. “Gabriel thinks free will is a slippery slope.”

Gabriel glowers at him, eyes flashing. And the smaller man clicks his fingers together, waves the bag that materializes at him. “Candy, Mike? Sam, Bobby – candy?” He unwraps one of the jewel-like discs, holds up his hand, slowly, deliberately crushes the cellophane wrapper up in his hand, drops it down at his feet. “Know it all,” he says softly. “In fact, I bet you think you know everything.”

— _the teenage girl in the passenger seat is looking up from a pile of papers and a textbook, glowering at him, feeding candy into her mouth and scrunching up the wrapper before she drops it in the footwell on top of a rapidly growing pile of bright cellophane and silver foil—_

“It was you,” Dean murmurs, incredulous. “It was you, in the car… eating candy. It was all a set-up.” And he’s tuning out the interference now, tuning into his brother, shaking his head in exasperation at what he finds. “You gutless little shit,” he scathes out viciously. “Too much of a coward to choose sides, too scared of what he might do, and where you might end up, so you pull one of your damn  _pranks_  to pass on your intel…”

Sam is darting his eyes from one of them to the other, looks puzzled, and his voice is rising, hopeful. “Dean, what is it now? What prank? Are you saying you aren’t him, it was a set-up? He’s the Trickster, right? So none of this is real, and you aren’t Michael?”

Dean snorts, ignores the question, taps the side of his head. “He planted it here… made it so I know everything,” he grates out. “Because he didn’t have the guts to actually tell me. Because it would mean taking sides, and he’s afraid to stand up to our brother, just like he said.” He takes a step towards Gabriel. “Whatever you did, switch it off,” he snarls. “It didn’t work properly. You made me forget stuff I need to know.”

Gabriel holds fast, doesn’t back away. “Oh build a bridge and get over it, Michael,” he says coldly. “It was the only thing I could think of at short notice. I can’t prank one of my own for long, you know that. It’s wearing off already. And I’m standing up to Lucifer now.” He throws a look across at Sam. “And I’m telling you now, too. There’s a way you can stop this without the death match, save six billion souls at the same time.”

All of them are taking slow, cautious steps forward now, moving together almost as one into a huddle in the center of the room while Dean watches. And Bobby is enthralled, the years dropping away from him, and he’s clenching and releasing his fists, and Sam has a fake half-smile curling his lips, fake because maybe it wasn’t what he hoped to hear but it’s still something, still lets them off the hook for mass murder on a global scale, and he’s looking for alternatives, for solutions, for an easier fix.  _Fake smile_ , Dean thinks suddenly, and in his head he can hear his brother’s voice mimicking sincerity, and whatever choices they make, whatever details they alter, he knows where they end up. And all he can see looking back at him in that moment is a forgery, artifice, deception,  _Lucifer_ , and it seems instinctive to distrust his brother, as instinctive as it is to be repelled by the sulfur that still stings his senses when Sam comes too close.

“It won’t be easy,” Gabriel is racing out, and he’s glancing over, and he’s anxious, uneasy. “You’re gonna have to trick him big time… get him—”

The click resounds around the room like it’s sensurround, his hand up at shoulder level, the pad of his thumb pressed firmly to his ring finger, sliding smoothly, snapping up and away from his palm, just like he did with Uriel back then.

And Sam and Bobby are blinking at each other through empty space, and Sam swings around to face him. “Where did he go?”

Dean shrugs. “Crab nebula,” he says sardonically.

“You seem to be getting the hang of this whole angel thing,” Bobby says dryly. “I hope you had a damn good reason for doing that, since he was just about to—”

“Give Lucifer the jump on plan B?” he snaps.

The old man pulls up short, his expression quizzical. “What does that mean?”

Dean doesn’t reply, but he hears his brother clear his throat, knows Sam has it figured out.

“He means me,” Sam says softly. “He thinks I’ll say yes. And that Lucifer will pick my brains once he’s through the door.”

Dean stares levelly back at his brother, keeps his tone as even as he can. “You’re easily led, Sam. And it’s not so much saying yes as being unable to say no once he starts working on you.”

Sam fists his hands, draws himself up. “I thought we—”

“This is tactics,” Dean says, brusque now. “I’m thinking strategically. Okay?”

His brother flushes, looks away, and there’s a moment of quiet before Bobby shakes his head, pulls off his cap, and rubs at his head.

“Well,” the old man says finally. “That – makes sense.” He shoots an apologetic look at Sam, turns his attention back, and he’s newly tense, suspicious. “But it doesn’t explain why this other option, whatever it is, is plan B. Care to enlighten us?”

Dean hesitates for just a minute, formulates his approach, keeps his voice suitably solemn. “It’s the end times,” he says. “And I’m going to kill my brother. I’m going to kill him because it’s right, and I have to, and because I’m a good son. And if he won’t be killed, well…” He smiles. “You’ll have plan B to fall back on.”

Bobby pales, and his eyes are flinty, his jaw tight. “You can’t do that,” he forces out, through gritted teeth. “You know what it means.”

“I know it means peace,” Dean says reasonably. “Paradise on Earth, instead of Hell. I’ve seen what happens, remember? I’ve seen what he does, because I didn’t stop him. And you’ve read Revelation, Bobby. The veil has been lifted. This, all of it, has been foretold.”

Sam is scrubbing an agitated hand through his hair, twists his head around to look at Bobby, looks back again, chews his lip. “Foretold?” he blurts out. “But what about free will? You just said… to Gabriel, you – you have free will, you must—”

“Free will is an illusion, Sam,” he cuts in. “Everything about me and my brother has led us to this moment, and he  _will_  be judged, along with all of the wicked. And the righteous will be rewarded, and we will see the beginning of Eternity. A new Heaven and a new Earth. Paradise found.”

Bobby backs his way to his desk, sits down on the chair, lethargic and heavy suddenly, but his voice stays as steady as a rock. “You’re the angel of forbearance and mercy, who presides over human virtue,” he says meaningfully, because he’s shrewd enough to have worked out exactly who he’s talking to. “You’re supposed to protect people. You might want to keep that in mind.  _Michael_.”

Dean starts towards the door, stops, glances over at Bobby. “If you know I’m the angel of forbearance and mercy, then you know some call me the angel of death too,” he says somberly. “I carry the souls of the deceased to Heaven. You might want to keep that in mind.  _Robert_.”

***

Sam gazes blankly at the doorway his brother just exited through, hears him creak away up the hall towards the back of the house, jumps as Bobby slams his hand down on his desk.

“Well, he sure knows how to clear a room.”

The old man stands, rubbing hard at his beard, fixes his eyes unwaveringly on Sam’s, and his expression is exhaustion, tinged with anxiety, maybe even fear. “Blood,” he snarls. “I want one of those angel begone sigils in every fuckin’ room within the hour, boy. Because he is seriously pissin’ me off with the whole Terminator act.”

Sam stares back dumbly, doesn’t even really know what he feels, can’t give it a name or categorize it, because it’s so much more than horror, so much more than hopelessness, so much more than defeat.

And Bobby is pacing now, his jaw moving back and forth like he’s chewing the cud, chewing on his thoughts. He spins, fixes Sam with flinty, pissed-off eyes. “Are you absolutely sure he’s even in there?” he says. “Because I know your brother snuck out of here intending to say yes, but there’s no damn way he’d choose annihilating the planet and everyone on it if there was another way.”

Sam’s voice is so faint he can barely hear it. “I’m sure he’s in there,” he whispers. “I know him. It’s him. He’s there.”

The old man splutters. “Well, is this some kind of split personality deal? If it is, who’s runnin’ the show? Because that there?” he waves a hand at the door. “That wasn’t your brother. That was…  _evil Spock_.”

Sam throws his hands up, helpless. “I don’t know… it’s like he’s Dean one minute but then he isn’t, it’s been like that since all of this first started. Like he’s some sort of weird hybrid of Michael and Dean, like he’s—”

“Mean,” the voice croaks over at the doorway and Sam swivels his head round, covers the ground in a few swift steps as Castiel starts to topple over, and he’s sniggering inanely as he flops in Sam’s arms.

“Hybrid,” he mutters. “Michael crossed with Dean.  _Mean_.”

Sam hauls him upright, grunting as he slings the man’s arm over his shoulder. “What the hell are you doing up?” he snaps. “You shouldn’t be walking around, you’ll start bleeding again…”

Castiel shrugs haphazardly. “My chest hurts. And the noise disturbed me.”

“I guess you heard him then,” Bobby retorts balefully. “Any thoughts?”

“How could I not?” the other man slurs. “It was quite a performance. My brother excels at… at…” He’s still gazing up at Sam and now his eyes widen. “When did that happen?” he says, and his expression is part fearful, part impressed.

“When did what happen?”

Castiel raises a shaking hand, points in the approximate direction of Sam’s right ear. “Your extra head,” he says, enunciating clearly, slowly, meticulously, the same exaggerated care he used when he showed up drunk after downing the liquor store.

It’s enough to raise Sam’s suspicions, and he leans down, sniffs. “Have you been drinking while we weren’t looking?” he demands, and he scowls over at Bobby. “When did he last have morphine?”

“Before I hit the couch,” the old man offers. “Unless you’ve dosed him since then?”

Castiel is frowning. “Have you been growing a second head while we weren’t looking?” He flails an arm at the middle distance. “There was a half-finished bottle of liquor on the desk in there. I was thirsty.” He snorts. “I’m only human, after all.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “I left a bottle of water under the bed,” he barks.

“Under the bed?” Castiel blinks at him, considers. “I can understand why you might expect under the bed to be the first place I’d look for water.” Then his eyes cross. “In fact, no I can’t.”

“Well I—”

Sam is interrupted by clamor from further up the hallway, and Bobby steps over, supports Castiel from the other side. “Sounds like show and tell just began,” he says, nodding at Sam. “I’ve got this. You should be in there, see what this demon has to say. He might let something slip about plan B.”

Sam maneuvers out from under Castiel and the angel is goggling up at him. “Plan B from Outer Space,” he says suddenly. “I watched that movie with Mean. In Maine.” He smiles idiotically. “Mean in Maine,” he repeats. “Good times. Agent Eddie Moscone.” He makes his voice a low growl. “ _F…B…I…_ ”

It’s so monumentally absurd Sam smiles, sort of, despite the fact it’s a reminder of  _Keith_ , of drifting rudderless, hitching rides, fetching up in some small town, washing dishes and tending bar, staring at his cellphone and willing it to ring, having his worst nightmare smeared over his lips and tasting its searing heat on his tongue again. “You’re stoned, Cas,” he says gently. “And it’s Plan Nine from Outer Space. It’s the worst movie ever made.”

Castiel looks puzzled. “But… my brother—” and he stops suddenly, ponders for a second. “ _Our_  brother told me it was a classic,” he murmurs drowsily up at Sam. “He told me this. And I feel sick.”

Bobby shifts him higher on his shoulder. “He lied,” the old man says harshly. “Don’t forget, you guys are fluent in all languages. And if you puke on my boots, I will drop you in your own vomit.”

***

Brady is pink faced and excited when Sam hovers in the doorway. He’s perspiring slightly, hair still perfect though, and he flashes a dazzling grin. “Sam Winchester, come on down,” he sneers. Let’s see if you can do any better than your brother…” He cocks his head, eyes gleaming. “Not the special one any more, Sam, huh? Not now Wonder Mike is in town…”

Sam glances over to his brother and Dean is leaning on the wall, arms crossed, casual, calm, watching. Watchful.

Brady tracks Sam’s glance, puckers up and blows kisses. “Oh Mickey, you’re so pretty,” he drawls insolently, “can’t you understand… it’s guys like you, Mickey…” He shivers deliciously, closes his eyes. “ _Ooh_ , what you do, Mickey, do Mickey…” And then he snaps his eyes open, black and bottomless. “I’ll take it like a man…  _Mickey_.”

Dean doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, just watches. And suddenly Brady is choking, his head slamming from side to side, and there’s a strangled wail, and Sam can smell burning. When Brady stops, abruptly, there’s a long trail of spittle hanging from his mouth, and his hair isn’t Kennedy perfect any more, and Dean is smiling. “That is so cool,” he murmurs, almost to himself before his eyebrows shoot up. “Did you see that?” he says to Sam, and he’s chipper, self-satisfied. “I didn’t even have to move, I just _thought_  it. Scanners or what?” He grins manically, and still he lounges, against the wall, relaxed, at ease. “I’m not a fan of eighties one-hit wonders, Brady,” he remarks thoughtfully. “So maybe you could do Stairway to Heaven for me? As a special favor for a special guy?”

He pushes upright then, and suddenly he’s different, and it makes Sam think of nothing so much as the few times Castiel has flicked the switch and turned it on, the charisma, the power to smite, reminds him of Uriel’s sheer arrogance, disdain, scorn for the hairless apes, the  _vermin_.

Dean prowls forward, predatory, his eyes blazing, and it’s simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. “I bet I can make you sound just like Robert Plant,” he says, and his voice is softly ferocious. “I bet I can make you sound like the folksy intro, the recorders, the drums, the electric piano, the guitar solo and the hard rock final section. All at once. Hell, let’s make it the fifteen-minute live version.” He curls his lips up in a smile like a great white, so menacing Sam feels his own throat go dry. “I bet I can even make you do it backwards, see if there really are Satanic messages in there. What do you say?”

Brady is staring at him, transfixed, until he gives himself a brief shake, cackles, leans his head across to wipe the drool off on his shoulder. “I don’t care if you make it the Pat Boone Christian rock version,” he grates out. “I don’t care if you make it the craptastic Live Aid version with Phil Collins on drums. It doesn’t matter.” The black shifts, leaving normal eyes staring out at them both. “Because whatever you do to me won’t compare to what he’ll do if I spill. And besides…” He smirks. “I like being on the winning side.”

Dean raises a skeptical eyebrow. “I’m curious,” he offers. “What do you think Lucifer winning means for you? And your kind? Because in case you hadn’t noticed, there is a fundamental difference.”

“When my Father wins, he’ll turn this place into his kingdom,” Brady announces confidently, and his eyes are shining with zeal. “It’ll be our turn to—”

Dean grunts. “Yeah, fire, brimstone, wailing, the smoke of eternal torment, yada yada,” he says amiably, flapping a dismissive hand. “Been there, done that. I’m just wondering why you think he’ll keep you guys around? Being as he’s the Morning Star, and you’re –  _not_.” He throws a look Sam’s way. “What do you think, Sam?”

Sam is startled but he finds his balance, and he’s good with this,  _bad cop, badder cop_ , and if nothing else it’s a way to get back on some sort of footing with Dean instead of hearing him in his head,  _I’m going to kill my brother_  resounding in there like his own death knell even though he knows Dean didn’t mean him. “I think that when the Morning Star cleans house, any demons he finds will get the mop,” he says steadily.

Brady throws his head back, hollers out laughter. “He created us,” he says finally, once he’s calm. “Why would he destroy us?” He looks at Sam like he feels sorry for him, like he pities his rank stupidity. “That makes no sense.”

Sam shrugs. “Look at what you are,” he says simply. “Belly to the ground, corrupt, depraved, filthy, diseased. Bacteria.” He stops for a minute, slants his eyes over at his brother, because it suddenly occurs to him that might be how Dean sees him now he’s upgraded, because his brother’s revulsion when he reached out to him was clear as day. He swallows, keeps going. “Look at what he is. The Lightbringer. He thinks he’s better than God. He won’t want roaches in his kitchen. And I’m thinking he won’t stop at spraying the pantry with Raid.”

The demon guffaws again, and then, almost faster than Sam can follow, his brother is there, hands on Brady’s thighs, leaning in so they’re eye to eye. “I’m tired of bumping gums with you, Brady,” he hisses. “You’re walking through a minefield in the valley of the shadow of death, my friend. And you don’t have a map. So I suggest you tell me what I need to know before I—”

“Smite me?” the demon spits back. “Like I said. Nothing you do to me could possibly… puh-puh…sss…”

And Dean stands straight and tall again, and now Brady is shaking, twitching, jerking, and his eyes are staring, blood vessels bursting and turning the whites scarlet, tears of blood now starting to trickle from the corners, from his nostrils too. He pulls his lips back from teeth clicking madly and weeping red at the gumline, clenches his jaw, grinds his molars together so hard that a cap snaps off and flicks itself out of his mouth, and the tremors and spasms are making their way down his body now, so intense the chair is jiggling up and down off the floor.

Brady’s eyes are glued on Dean and all the while Dean is standing, watching, face contemplative, arms crossed again. “Where is he?” he says calmly, gently even, and maybe there is twisted sympathy glowing in his eyes.

It’s sickening, deeply disturbing, and more than anything else it makes Sam think of Alastair, makes him think of what Alastair molded his brother into, makes him think of his own hand reaching out and making the demon dance for him in Wyoming, while he squeezed its confession out of it and its eyes bulged and popped out of their sockets in its dying horror. “Dean,” he cuts in sharply. “Dean, for God’s sake. No more.”

And suddenly it stops, and Brady is staring wildly, red-eyed and blood streaked, sucking in breath, wheezing as he does.

“Pestilence,” Dean says, just as reasonably as before. “Where is he?”

The demon hoiks a mouthful of bloody saliva out onto the floor. “You getting angry, Mike?” he stutters. “Am I cracking that cool, calm exterior of yours?”

Dean chuckles, seems genuinely amused. “I’m somewhat irritated by you, Brady,” he says. “But I’m not angry, not yet. You’ll know when I am, and believe me you won’t like me when I’m angry.” He reaches down, tips the demon’s head up, fingers under his chin. “I  _can_  be worse than my brother,” he says softly. “Way worse… you have no idea. Have you people forgotten where I learned how to do this? At the feet of the master.”

Brady glowers. “Yeah, I heard you were a quick study, that you graduated with flying colors…” He coughs, spits again. “They say there’s nothing worse than a convert.” He meets Dean’s gaze unblinkingly. “I’d say an archangel torturing souls in the Pit fits the bill. Well? What have you got?”

Dean smiles, all the megawatts. “Boy, Brady, I’m starting to like you. You’ve got guts.” He cocks his head. “You ever wondered what they look like? I’m wondering right now, so what say we—”

And Sam finds he doesn’t give a shit about Dean’s no-fly zone, or maybe it’s Michael’s, what the hell, because he’s reaching out, grabbing his brother and hoisting him back and around. “What the hell has gotten into you?” he yelps.

Dean raises an eyebrow. “Hell had nothing to do with it,” he retorts snippishly. “Well. Not all of it, though torture 101 is coming in handy—”

“We don’t do this, Dean,” Sam grates out. “Exorcise him, knife him, whatever. But we don’t do this. We don’t torture—”

And it’s Dean’s turn to cut in. “You sure about that, Sam?” he challenges. “From what Castiel told me, Alastair might beg to differ.” He stares at Sam, hard-eyed. “That nurse too,” he adds, and he smiles again, and it’s savage.

Sam knows he winces, knows his brother notices it, but he injects a note of defiance into his reply anyway. “What about the host, Dean? I knew him, he could be in there, and maybe—” The sound of Brady’s giggle cuts him off and he twists his head to look.

“Yeah, Brady here, he was a good kid,” the demon says cheerfully, even though blood is still oozing from his nose and his eyes.

And Sam glances back to his brother and Dean’s stare is opaque now, and he shrugs. “Book him, Danno,” he says indifferently. “Let’s see if friendly persuasion works.” He backs away, leans his butt down on the table, and now he’s all silent appraisal again, and Sam thinks he might be even more terrifying.

“Straight arrow,” Brady is saying now. “Your best friend. Perfect point of access…”

 _Thanksgiving_.

He must have said it out loud, because the demon’s eyes light up.

“Yessir!” He nods sagely. “Remember when I came back from break all messed up, dropped out of pre-med, the drugs, the bitches… that wasn’t Brady. That was me.” He smiles, insincere. “You spent all that time trying to get me back on the right track… boy, Sammy, you really were a good friend, such a sweet, caring, all-round good guy… man I jerked your chain along the road, and you came to heel like the dumb pup you were.”

Sam controls his breathing, in-out, steady as she goes, counts each inhale and exhale, meditates his way to tranquility as Brady drones on, and every word is like a blow, and he can feel Dean’s eyes on him, can sense his stare, and it’s like his brother is studying him, monitoring him, and he has this feeling that if he looks Dean will be doing an approximation of Castiel’s fascinated-curious-absorbed head tilt. And now Brady is saying something about Jess,  _I toasted her on the ceiling_ , and now Sam is losing his carefully wrested control, because she was innocent, in the wrong place at the wrong time because of him. And he can feel his heart beating faster as it curls in protectively around that secret, soft place where he keeps her, feel icy cold start flooding out from his center to his limbs—

“…She thought we were friends too,” Brady is taunting, and the words are racing out of him now, almost feverishly. “She let me right in… she was baking cookies. She was so surprised… so hurt, when I started in on her…”

It’s not as easy as it once was, Sam muses, as he starts to beckon the filth out of Brady, not as easy without the blood, the fuel injection of Ruby-red, and with Crowley’s binding spell in the mix. He can feel himself draining as he tugs, but it’s working, and Brady is wincing and groaning.

“Do it, if it’ll make you feel better,” the demon croaks out, and his eyes are shining with glee. “Do it, Sammy, do it, come on! Because you’re just like us…” He splutters, spits, swallows, glares, and the smoke is hanging onto him, diseased black talons shredding the host inside as they hook into soft tissue and hold tight to the meat.

And Sam patiently visualizes himself unhooking every claw, one by one, pulling. “I’m going to rip your heart out,” he snarls, and it’s thrilling, it’s like the best sex he ever had, just like it always was, the power to do exactly what he wants to, and he can feel it build in him till he’s fit to burst and send it spewing forth.

“Hell, yes!” Brady shrieks joyfully. “We’ve got the same stuff in our veins… deep down, you know you’re just like us, so come on Sam! Get angry…” His voice rises again, into a squeal of rage and agony. “Get really,  _really_  angry, you let out all that pent-up rage—”

… _All that pent-up rage. I’m gonna need it._

It’s in Sam’s head, quiet, reasonable, affable. It’s  _Lucifer_. And Sam shuts it off, reels, claps his hands to his cheeks, his rage gone, damp-squibbed out of existence like it never was, like a balloon popped, a spigot turned off, an engine dying, the calm after the storm.

“Come on, big guy,” Brady chokes out hoarsely, into the quiet. “You can do it, what the fuck are you waiting for?”

Sam stares down at him, swallows dryly. “You’re wrong,” he chokes out. “I’m not like you.”

Brady double-takes, snorts in disbelief. “Oh, come on,” he laughs. “You gotta be kidding me, man. You’re pulling your punches now?  _Seriously_?”

There’s a noise behind Sam, his brother appearing at his shoulder.

“Why so surprised, Brady?” Dean says, and his tone is cold, grim satisfaction. “He isn’t like your kind. He never was.” He glances at Sam and his eyes are scorching compared to his voice. “Outside. I’ll take it from here.”

Sam nods stiffly, walks out of the room ramrod straight, closes the door behind him, doubles over outside in the hallway and heaves in oxygen for a full minute, head spinning, before he leans heavily on the wall and slides down onto his butt.

On the other side of the door the noise starts, works up to a crescendo of earsplitting banshee screeches of agony that gradually ascend through the octaves, punctuated by mindless blubbering and brief moments of silence when he can hear a voice speaking quietly, politely.  _Michael_ , because Sam can’t bring himself to think any part of this is his brother at work. 

He’s tired, and it’s been days since he slept properly. He yawns, and out of the blue, as he presses his hands up to his ears, it crosses his mind that maybe it was a test.

***

Bobby concentrates on his book, forces his eyes to follow the words, makes his lips move silently as he reads, wishes he’d closed the door, doesn’t want to make it glaringly obvious by getting up and doing just that. And he snorts inwardly and thanks God his place is miles from anywhere.

“Enhanced interrogation tactics…” Castiel croaks from the bed. “Can be…  _effective_.”

Bobby grunts, looks up. “You feeling any better?” It comes out naturally, without artifice, and after he says the words he finds he does care, is concerned, even though he never really expected it.

The angel frowns. “Yes. I am… thank you.” He glances over. “Thank you for taking care of me.” His face is pale and drawn with exhaustion and something that might be regret, and he looks smaller somehow.

Bobby shrugs, noncommittal, ponders for a minute as he regards the other man. “I always thought you looked pretty harmless,” he says. “Maybe it’s the whole accountant disguise, the bed hair, the big baby blues. But you guys in general…” He pauses a beat. “I’m starting to think you ain’t really any better than the demon scum we fight.”

Castiel blinks slowly at him. “We are soldiers,” he offers simply. “This is a war. All is fair in love and war. Torture with a purpose isn’t torture, it’s…  _efficiency_. So I’m told.”

“Uh-huh. And it doesn’t trouble you?”

“I didn’t say it doesn’t trouble me.” Castiel swallows, flicks his eyes over to the desk. “Water?”

Bobby leans across, unscrews the bottle. “You need me to prop you up?”

“Please.”

Bobby heaves Castiel up, stuffs pillows down behind his shoulders, asks because he can’t help feeling curious. “Have you ever made someone – some _thing_  – sound like that?”

Castiel narrows his eyes, and they’re steely gray and razor-sharp now. He doesn’t reply but his look answers the question, and Bobby feels himself shiver because in that flash of a second it’s the look of a centuries-old supernatural being, God’s warrior, who has probably destroyed more demons than Bobby has the capacity to imagine, and who survived forty years in the Pit while his brothers perished in the flames. And then the brief glimpse of ruthlessness is gone, and Castiel sips water from the bottle, wipes his mouth. “I imagine I sounded like that when Zachariah re-educated me,” he says suddenly. “I imagine I sounded like that in Hell too.” He grins wryly. “In fact, I’m certain I did. Proving that what goes around comes around, don’t you think?”

Bobby meets the level gaze for a moment, puts his book down on the floor, rests his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, stares back at Castiel some more, because he’s been replaying it in his mind, what the other man slurred out earlier. “He’s your brother,” he says. “Michael. You know him.”

Castiel shoots him another look, furtive now, like he knows exactly where Bobby is going with this.

“So you can maybe give us some insight into how he operates,” Bobby continues. “Tell me what you meant by _performance_.”

And Castiel smiles tiredly. “You’re a wily old bastard, Bobby Singer,” he rasps out. “A wily,  _wily_  old bastard.” He sips water from the bottle again, holds it out, meets Bobby’s eyes. “So Dean says,” he qualifies faintly.

“I’ll bet he does.” Bobby takes the bottle, places it on the side table next to the bed. “It’s right there,” he says. “All you need to do is reach over for it. As opposed to crawling to the liquor cabinet.”

“I drink to forget,” Castiel murmurs. “Don’t we all?”

Bobby snorts. “ _Performance_ ,” he prompts. “There was subtext.”

The other man is gazing up at the ceiling, seems to be miles away, but eventually he replies. “My brother,” he starts, and he falters, shivers, and his voice goes cold. “My brother has many responsibilities,” he says. “He has come back to fight against Satan and evil, and to rescue the souls of the faithful from the power of the devil. He is our champion… he inspires, he motivates, he unites.”

Bobby grimaces. “He ain’t inspiring me,” he snaps. “Or motivating me, or uniting me.”

Castiel’s expression drifts into thoughtful, mildly absorbed. “Think of my brother as a politician, Bobby,” he continues. “A politician with many different cliques, and factions, and sects, and groups to appease, and lead. Think of how he might mollify these opposing forces and distract them from their dissension, and disharmony, and discord… think of how he might influence their thoughts and actions by saying what needs to be—”

“Said,” Bobby cuts in softly. “Saying what needs to be said…”

“…and what needs to be  _heard_ , to ensure conformity and obedience, even as he may do the exact opposite to achieve his true ends.” Castiel smiles again, knowingly. “As I said, it was quite a performance. My brother excels at speechmaking.”

Bobby huffs out, leans back in his chair. “So… he was feeding us a line.”

Castiel’s eyes close, shutting Bobby out, and the conversation down. “Make of it what you will,” he murmurs. “I can’t confirm or deny that Michael is feeding you a line. You’ll have to ask him. All I can tell you is that my brother excels at speechmaking.”

And maybe that’s why it is that Bobby suddenly feels a spark of affection for the other man, for his sheer deviousness wrapped up in devotion, and allegiance, and faithfulness to someone Bobby loves as his own. “And you excel at loyalty,” he remarks.

“I excel at loyalty.”

“You’re a sneaky sonofabitch.”

“Can I assume that was a compliment?”

“You can, son.”

Bobby reaches down for his book, starts flicking through the pages, and it’s quiet for a few minutes.

“Things will be different now,” Castiel says softly.

Although he couldn’t swear to it, Bobby thinks the other man’s voice is odd, that there might be a note of melancholy, even dread, running through it. “You’re not happy about it,” he replies bluntly. “You love him, it’s written all over your face every damn time you look at him. You knocked him into next week to stop him from saying yes.”

“Oh… you’re wrong, Bobby,” Castiel counters, a low whisper filtered through a half smile. “I feel… joy. To see my brother again, to be with him again, is more than I can…”

“But?”

“It comes at great cost. There are decisions to be made. And it will be difficult for Dean… difficult for you and Sam too. We all love Dean, after all.”

And Bobby sure as hell isn’t going to argue with that.

***

Sam gets used to the noise, maybe even dozes through it, and it becomes normal enough for the abrupt silence to jolt him alert again. A few minutes after it all goes quiet again, Dean opens the door, almost trips over Sam.

“Was that some kind of test?” Sam blurts out straightaway, but he doesn’t look up, just stares at Dean’s boots.

His brother steps around him, lowers himself down onto the floor beside him. “You should get some rest,” he says randomly.

“Did I pass?” Sam says bitterly. “Or do you still think I’m putting down the welcome mat for Satan?”

Dean doesn’t look at him, and his voice is quiet and steady. “You got a B plus. And it’s not as if I don’t have damn good reasons for being cautious, Sam. Is it? Given what’s at stake here.”

And Sam doesn’t reply, and maybe he doesn’t even really blame his brother because sometimes he lies awake in the dark and his brain stings and throbs with the possibility Lucifer might not give him a choice, because if the right pressure was applied to the right person Sam thinks he might even go down on his knees and beg the devil to take him  _right the fuck now_ , even if it meant the end of the world, and maybe, just maybe, he could make it conditional.

He changes the subject.

“Do you think what he said about Jess is true?”

“I don’t know,” his brother says diplomatically, and he shrugs. “Demons lie.”

“Can you do the whole magic finger time travel thing?” Sam finds himself saying suddenly. “Could you take me back? To that night? So I could be there with her?”

After a long moment, Dean sighs. “Yeah, I could do it.” His voice is somber. “But I’m not going to.”

And Sam knew what the answer would be, but he can’t help imagining it even as he tries to blot her big, goofy smile out of his mind. “Maybe I could get her out of there before he… _before_. Stop him.” He presses the heel of his hand up to his eyes, and his grief swells his throat so it hurts to speak. “She baked cookies for me Dean,” he whispers. “Maybe for you too, maybe she thought you’d stop by for a while and sleep on the couch, and she’d get to know you… And if I could just go back. Even if it meant walking in and dumping her, telling her I’d met someone else and that she could pack her stuff and get the fuck out before he showed. If that’s what it took I’d do it, I’d—”

“Everything is happening like it was supposed to, no matter what we’ve done to try to make it different,” Dean cuts in, and he’s utterly composed. “If it didn’t happen on that night, it would happen another night. It’s just – meant to be, Sam. Because it isn’t random, and it isn’t chance. It’s a plan that’s playing itself out perfectly.”

“And that means what?” Sam mutters. “That we just bend over for them? That we give in?”

“It isn’t like that,” his brother says, reasonable again. “And there’s no point in running and hiding. It’s too late.”

“But there’s free will, Dean,” Sam insists. “Or  _Michael_ … whoever you are. There’s free will. You do have it, or else you would have left Castiel in the Pit. You can still make your own destiny.”

Dean’s head swivels to look at him, eyes critical, a moment’s hushed assessment that feels like years. “But sometimes thinking we don’t make our own destiny can be a comfort,” he murmurs then. “Knowing someone else is pulling the strings means we don’t have to take responsibility for stupid choices… really stupid choices that let the devil out of Hell to—”

Sam hesitates for half a heartbeat before he cuts his brother off, and he snarls it out, sharp and bitter. “Jesus, Dean. You know how damned sorry I am about it. I chose her, chose a demon over my brother, and yeah, it was the wrong choice. But I’m trying to move on, and I thought you were too, and I thought you were okay with it now.” 

And Dean tilts his head, gets an odd, searching, perplexed look on his face like he doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t reply for a minute. “I’m not talking about you, Sam,” he says finally. “But now we’re on the subject, I’m never going to think that you choosing her was okay. It wasn’t, and it isn’t, and it never will be. And I know that you’re sorry, but I’m not going to lie to you about it just so you can feel better.” He sighs out then. “But I will tell you this,” he says softly. “You’re my brother. _My_ blood, not theirs. Never theirs. And I love you more than you’ll ever know. I always will.” He smiles, just barely, fondly. “You’re a keeper, Sam.”

Dean’s eyes are suddenly warm and gentle, and it’s the expression he wore in New Harmony when he was telling Sam goodbye, the expression he wore in Pontiac when he was smiling at Sam, alive and safe, and Sam thinks he could drown in it, and he’d never come up for air, and he’d die happy. “I’m going to lose you to this,” he whispers. “It’s happening already.”

His brother casts his eyes down and to the side. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, Sam.”

Sam sags against the wall, can feel the heat rise in his cheeks. “But you’re still going to burn it all down.” He clenches his jaw, purses his lips. “Did Brady tell you?”

Dean nods slowly. “Oh, he told me.” He reaches up distractedly, tugs at his top lip with his thumb and forefinger. “And there isn’t much time.”

“Until you help Lucifer destroy the world?” Sam replies morosely, and he feels a stab of satisfaction as he sees Dean’s right leg start jittering there on the floor, so his brother has to press his hand on it to still the tremors.

“You have no idea…” Dean says, so quiet Sam almost can’t hear him. “No fuckin’ idea what’s at stake, what it’ll be like if he—” He stops, exhales sharply. “Sometime this week, San Francisco will shake so hard she tumbles into the bay within six minutes of the first tremor,” he says then, suddenly brusque. “It could be happening right now. After that, a category ten is going to wipe half of Florida off the map. Spin the globe on Bobby’s desk, stop it and point. You’ll find a war somewhere on whatever continent you’re touching. And Pestilence is about to launch Croatoan in a big way. And those, all of them – they’re  _signs_. Portents.”

“But that doesn’t have to mean—”

“It’s going down,” Dean says deliberately. “Lucifer knows I’m back – bush telegraph, remember? This can’t be stopped without stopping him, whatever that means, and it has to happen before he  _upgrades_.” He stops, eyes Sam as if he’s waiting for the meaning to sink in before he continues. “I’m going to slay the dragon, Sam. It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.”

Sam dips his face into his palm. “But Dean,” he chokes out. “We’ve fought so hard to put this right.”

“Sam—”

Dean’s eyes flash, and Sam sees him visibly bite back what he’s going to say, sees him self-edit.

“Trust me, Sam,” his brother says gently. “And you need to sleep.”

And he snaps his head up, and Dean is reaching, pointing, the gentlest touch on his brow, and the world switches off.

***

It’s dead quiet in the den, the darkness punctuated by the faint light of Bobby’s penlight as the old man scans his book, the moonlight glowing in through the window from outside. Dean stands in the doorway for a few seconds, drifts in gradually, hovers next to the bed as Bobby glances up wordlessly. “Has he woken up at all?” he says softly, slanting his eyes down at the motionless figure, and he can’t help it, his eyes drift to the livid handprint standing out in sharp relief on Castiel’s shoulder.

“For a while. He’s exhausted. He hollered all night long after he got back. For you.” Bobby grimaces. “For Michael, anyway. In Enochian, mostly.” He stares up for a minute. “He said other stuff too. Sounds like he had a pretty tough time down there.”

Dean parks one butt cheek on the bed, considers what the old man said. “It’s the main event when they get an angel down there,” he murmurs. “It’s like a feeding frenzy… they sell tickets to it, dress up. It’s like taking in a Broadway show.” He shudders reflexively and comes back to himself with a jolt, finds the old man is gazing at him and his eyes are softer. “He was there before,” he continues, and he swallows, steadies his voice. “For years. Looking for me. He’ll be fine.”

“Well, you’d know,” Bobby offers quietly. He leans over to put his book down on the floor, rises on a groan. “This whole Michael deal… I guess that’s why you were the righteous man,” he says suddenly, and he smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Never could figure that one out, all the cussin’ and the drinking. And the women.” He snorts. “You know what they say… if all the women you’ve had over the years were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

Dean smiles weakly, shrugs, looks away and down again as Castiel shifts on the bed and mutters something unintelligible.

“So, this whole falling from grace business,” Bobby says pointedly. “Sam says it’s bad news for you guys.”

And Dean finds his throat has gone sandpaper dry even at the thought of it, and he has to swallow hard before he can speak. “It’s disobedience. And expulsion.”

“Uh-huh.” Bobby gives him a measured stare.

“It’s a repudiation of the Host, of what we are. A rejection of God.”

The old man pouts in disgust. “I think God rejected him first, don’t you? And you and Sam at the same time. So maybe he didn’t fall so much as he was pushed.”

“It’s not that easy,” Dean says. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“I think you can work this exactly how you want to. Since no one’s really looking.”

Dean blurts it out then. “Believe me, I don’t want to make it hard on him. But what he did… it’s immoral. It’s iniquity, unGodly and unrighteous, he—”

“Thinks the sun, the moon and the stars shine out of your ass,” the old man interjects scathingly. “And you pulled him out. And the noise you had that demon making sounded pretty immoral to me. So I’m sensing a conflict here, between what you’re saying and what you’re thinking. And doing.” He pins Dean with a shrewd, assessing look. “Well?”

Dean scuffs his boot on the floor for a minute, chooses his words carefully. “Okay. There’s things I’m supposed to do… _meant_  to do. And they’re the right things, but they’re the wrong things too. And then there are things I  _want_  to do, more than you can possibly…” He looks away. “And they’re the wrong things. But they’re the right things too. I’m trying to reconcile so much, and I’m—”

“Saying what needs to be said. What needs to be heard, too.”

He stares back at Bobby, doesn’t answer.

“It just seems to me that you’re putting a whole lot of effort into tracking down Pestilence,” the old man continues meaningfully. “When you could just flap off to wherever Lucifer is and start Armageddon.”

Dean strums out his tension on his thigh. “I can’t just flap off to where he is,” he says tightly. “I don’t know where he is. I’m not picking him up.”

Bobby cocks his head, thrown off track for a minute. “Is that normal?”

Dean chews his lip. “It’s… unexpected. I should be able to sense him.” Unbidden, his eyes drift over to the man in the bed again, and he remembers a far-off conversation.  _I should be able to get a funny feeling about him_ , he thinks, before he switches his gaze back to Bobby. “Lucifer can’t give his own vessel the sigil, it doesn’t work that way… it has to come from another angel. So I’m assuming the Horsemen are cloaking him.”

“Can they do that?”

Dean shrugs. “They’re on the same pay grade, but it’s not their MO. In fact they shouldn’t even be on his team, they don’t answer to him. That’s one of the many things I don’t get about this.” He rolls his shoulders, feels a cracking sensation in the back that Bobby must hear, because the old man’s eyes widen.

“You have…  _wings_.”

“They don’t manifest fully in this dimension,” Dean says, and he feels damned self-conscious about it if he’s honest. Bashful about his wings, and he almost laughs out loud at how  _fuckin’ ridiculous_  it all is. “It just feels weird back there. Heavy between the shoulders.” He clears his throat nervously, and from nowhere he gets a sudden image of Castiel, the shadow of his wings flaring out blackly that first night, sheltering him in Duluth, when he dreamed of Hell. “I could… show you,” he ventures. “An impression of them. A  _shadow_.”

Bobby considers, raises a critical eyebrow. “So,” he announces flatly. “Like I said before. You seem to be getting the hang of this whole angel thing.”

Dean supposes it’s an opening, sort of. And the words spill out of him, haltingly, because he feels a sense of astonishment, wonderment, awe, even reverence about it himself.  “I just – it’s amazing, Bobby. It’s like – I remember something or I just do something, without thinking about it or wondering if I even can do it, and it  _works_ , and it feels natural, it feels like I’ve always been able to do it. It’s like I’m just now becoming what I was always meant to be. What I always was, what I really am. It’s – instinctive.  _Familiar_.”

“Like – sense memory,” Bobby observes grudgingly.

“Yeah…” He nods. “And that one thing is a piece of the puzzle, and it fills this tiny gap, and then ten other pieces just slot into place right behind it.” He holds up his hand, marvels at it, flicks his gaze back to Bobby. “I have magic fingers,” he says. “Sam is fast asleep upstairs because I gave him the magic finger. Can you believe that? And Brady… I shredded him. He didn’t stand a chance, I got what I needed from him and…” He snaps his fingers, sees the old man wince. “I obliterated him. He isn’t even a damp spot on the floor, he’s just –  _gone_. Like he was never here. The power, it’s – fuckin’ amazing. What I can do with it.”

Bobby’s eyes are hard, chips of ice. “That’s what Sam thought,” he dares bluntly. “Ain’t it?”

And it’s gone, that moment of  _maybe_  connection, of  _maybe_ understanding, lost in the old man’s unyielding stare, and Dean deflates so fast he’s sure he hears the hiss of escaping air. “This – it isn’t the same,” he snaps back. “Don’t ever think it is.  _Ever_.”

“Well, your brother used his power to start the end of the world,” Bobby offers. “Sounds like you intend using yours to finish the end of the world.” His forehead creases as he raises his eyebrows. “Of course, I’m assuming Armageddon is what you really want,” he backtracks abruptly. “I mean… I don’t know exactly why the  _angel of death_  would be tying himself up here trying to find out where the Horsemen are when it stands to reason he’d be better off leaving them to fan the flames.” He leans forward, makes his voice deliberate. “Assuming Armageddon is what you really want. Like I said.”

Dean eyeballs the old man for a minute, and Bobby’s expression is cagey now, suspicious, because he always has been a canny old bastard. He smiles despite himself. Like a dog with a fuckin’ bone, he thinks, Bobby and Sam both. He swipes a hand along his jaw, chooses his words carefully. “This is need to know…” he starts, stops as Bobby ratchets it up to a look like a dentist’s drill.

“Need to know meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning you.” He nods down at Castiel. “And him.  _Only_. Like I said, Sam is out of the loop on this, Bobby. If he – if anything  _happens_ … if my brother – if  _Lucifer_  – gets inside his head…” He glares at Bobby as hard as he can, wonders if his eyes might turn to stone like Castiel’s do when he’s laying down the law. “This really is tactics. Lucifer cannot know this. And that means Sam can’t either.”

Bobby doesn’t bat an eyelid. “Go on.”

“Let’s suppose Gabriel is right. And there is another option.”

The old man’s eyes suddenly gleam bright as silver dollars. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s.”

Dean starts doodling aimless patterns on the blanket with a finger as he talks. “Let’s suppose the cage is still down there, and Lucifer doesn’t know about it. And that there are four keys to the cage, and that if we get them all we can open it up again…”

He can see Bobby putting it all together, eyes like calculators. “Sonofabitch…” he breathes. “Gabriel’s clue. It has no top or bottom, but it can hold flesh, bones and blood all at the same time.” He shakes his head. “I knew that sounded familiar. It’s a  _ring_.”

“Yep. Four rings to be exact,” Dean confirms. “The four Horsemen’s rings. And we already have two of them.”

“Christ,” Bobby mutters. “And we could put him back in solitary… the smackdown wouldn’t have to be plan A.” He chews his thumbnail for a second, snorts. “And Gabriel couldn’t just  _tell_  you this?”

Dean doesn’t reply straightaway, doesn’t tell the old man he isn’t really sure in his own mind what plan A is. “You have to try to understand, Bobby,” he says finally. “Smacking the malakhim around is one thing—”

“Malakhim?” Bobby cuts in, quizzical.

Dean jerks his head down at Castiel. “Sorry… I mean the messengers. Beating up on grunts like Castiel is a game to the Trickster, but for Gabriel to betray another archangel… it’s too much.” He sees the old man’s expression of disgust, holds up a hand. “I know you’ve read The Inferno,” he says. “The ninth circle… Betrayal. One of its rings is—”

“Cocytus,” Bobby interrupts, and his eyes are darker. “I remember. When that Bender kid took you in Duluth, Castiel said you dreamed of Cocytus.”

Dean nods. “One of its rings is named for Cain. Traitors to kindred are there immersed in the ice, up to their faces… for betrayal is the worst sin.” He crosses his arms, finds he’s shuddering at the memory. “Gabriel doesn’t want to end up there, Bobby. And I don’t blame him, not really.”

Bobby takes it all in, exhales sharply. “You don’t blame him,” he echoes. “So.  _Crab nebula?_ ”

Dean smirks. “He pranked me. He’s a slippery little sucker. He deserved it.”

Bobby chuckles softly and it turns into a sigh, heaved out and desolate.

“What?”

“You sound like…  _you_.”

Dean sighs himself. “That’s because I am me,” he insists gently. “Like I said. I don’t really understand it myself, Bobby. I’m him. But I’m me.” He gazes down into the old man’s sad eyes. “Bobby, look at me and tell me you don’t know me,” he says, and he smiles. “I remember all those things you remember. Course, I’ve been trying to blot out the ass wiping for twenty-six years, but it’s there. You’d tell me to bend over and lift and separate, and you’d get a big handful of—”

“But how did this even happen?” Bobby chokes. “I didn’t want this for you, none of us did. What’s going to happen to you after all this goes down?” He pulls off his cap, leans into the palm of his hand. “Dean,” he grinds out, as if the words are hurting him. “What’s going to happen to you?” He breathes slow and deep, tries to calm himself while his shoulders shake.

“I don’t really what’s going to happen,” Dean says. “Maybe I’ll just have to Clark Kent my way through life… for as long as I’m here, anyway. But I’m good with it, Bobby.”

The old man looks up and his eyes are damp now. “I don’t understand that,” he mutters. “I don’t know how you can be good with it.”

“Things happen for a reason—”

“You ever notice they only say that about  _bad_  things?”

Dean throws up his hands. “You know… destiny isn’t that bad, Bobby,” he says. “It lets me off the hook for…” He stops, gropes for words. “Look, I spent a lot of time trying to figure all of this out, trying to see where I could have done things differently. I started this, remember? With bad decisions. I made the deal, I got off the rack, I broke the first seal, and—”

“It wasn’t your fault, Dean,” Bobby grates out harshly. “You didn’t know what those decisions would lead to.” He pauses a beat. “And I made my own stupid fuckin’ decision when I didn’t stop your brother.”

“No, you don’t get it, Bobby,” he races out. “What I’m saying is that maybe it isn’t our fault if it was all meant to go down that way… it means there isn’t anywhere we could have done things differently. It’s like I said – someone would have let Sam out, even if it wasn’t Castiel. And you never would have shot Sam to stop him leaving. And maybe that means I don’t have to keep destroying myself with the guilt I feel for climbing off that rack. We never had free will, not really. It was just always going to happen, it was  _destined_ , and maybe that might help me live with what I did down there. And _this_ …” He presses a hand to his chest. “Maybe I didn’t want it, but whatever quirk of fate that makes me him, well… it _comforts_  me. It fills up this hole I’ve had in me for a long time now—”

“Stop,” Bobby cuts in suddenly, sharply. “Stop right there. Because you’re talking like destiny is still on the table. You’re talking like you plan on doing the things you’re supposed to do, like you can’t choose to do those  _wrong_  things that are really the right things. You’re talking like you don’t think you can change a damn thing, and like you might not even plan on trying.” Bobby waits, waits for him to answer, continues when he doesn’t. “Well? Do you plan on trying?”

Dean gazes back at the old man for a moment. “Like I said,” he replies neutrally. “I’m trying to reconcile a lot of things.”

Bobby’s voice is ragged now. “Were you just telling me what you thought I needed to hear when you fed me that line about the cage? Because it—”

“Michael,” Castiel cuts in, gravel-voiced, and he’s reaching up and rubbing his eyes, dazed, frowsy and unshaven, yawning.

And Dean finds he’s smiling, feels a full sensation in his chest that suddenly makes him think of Cold Oak, of walking back into the room there and seeing Sam up and at it, and he remembers the delight, the relief, the sheer  _promise_  of his brother alive and not lost to him. Something surges up inside him, and it’s comfort, it’s contentment, it’s the same  _fuckin’ happiness_  as then, he thinks, a flood of affection, elation, a giddy, careless moment when he feels almost serene with joy. And maybe he didn’t even know how miserable he was until now, when this last shadow lifts, all in the space of the second it takes for Bobby to push upright abruptly and start speaking again. He glances back to the old man, uses the moment to tamp it down, steady his breathing and his nerves, and he wonders if it’s his euphoria he’s feeling or Michael’s.

“What you said,” Bobby ventures, calmer now. “Before… about where Gabriel doesn’t want to end up, about why he isn’t taking sides. About why you don’t blame him.” He points at the bed. “He’s going to end up there, because he took sides, betrayed his brothers. Maybe you already know that, maybe it’s where he was when you pulled him out. But you might want to keep that in mind, that he took that risk for you, even if he is just a messenger. Falling from grace might be your murder one, but he did it for you.” He pauses a beat. “Well, for Dean, anyway. And since you keep saying you’re Dean…” He trails off, walks towards the door. “His dressings need changing, by the way,” he throws back over his shoulder as he leaves.

Dean tracks the old man, thinks what a damn crafty fucker he is as he exits the room, keeps his eyes on the door as it closes on the awkward silence.

“Michael,” the voice repeats, and it’s tired, annoyed, but then it suddenly softens into fondness. “Dean. You fucking idiot. Why did you do that? It was unbelievably stupid. Why did you have to go and do that?”

Dean hops off the bed, moves to sit in the chair Bobby just vacated, pulls it up closer to the bed. “I knew you were faking it before,” he bitches. 

Castiel persists. “Why did you do that?”

“What, grip you tight and raise you from perdition?” Dean challenges. “I think you know why.”

“And did you close that doorway to doubt behind you?” Castiel snarks back. He shakes his head. “It weakens you, makes you vulnerable. You shouldn’t be taking risks like that. Too much is at stake.”

Dean snorts. “No one’s watching. It’s just us, remember?” He points upwards. “God left the building.”

“If you fall, then everything will be lost,” Castiel says, sharp again. “It was foolish, Michael. It was a  _mistake_.”

Dean meets Castiel’s gaze unflinchingly. “It might have been foolish, Castiel, but it wasn’t a mistake,” he says tightly. “I would never leave you there.  _Never_. You never left me. It was a risk worth taking. And if I’d figured this mess out sooner, I’d have pulled you out then.” He fumes briefly but potently, then slants his eyes across to the handprint. “That sore?”

“Not overly.”

Castiel doesn’t blink, and Dean wonders fleetingly if it might be some weird genetic thing Jimmy Novak had going on, that he only blinked four times a minute or something. “I remember what you told me in the dream, back in Duluth,” he blurts out quite at random then, and he doesn’t even know where the thought came from. “My mark is on  _your_ soul now.”

Castiel stares back, still intense, and Dean breaks the moment, leans forward and rests his palm briefly on the dressings covering the other man’s chest. He sends something he hasn’t quite indentified yet out of himself, a flare of energy, the same force he used to turn Brady into thin air before his very eyes, but this is so very different because this comes from somewhere different. His heart, he supposes, even though he’s dimly aware that despite his joy at seeing his brother again, at some level he’s utterly repelled by his sin, his fall, the hollow, black space where his grace was, and he snatches his hand back as soon as it’s done because the contact tasers up his arm and scalds him to his core.

Castiel bucks, yelps. “ _Mmmmph_ ,” he spits out, and he pats desperately at himself, breathes his discomfort in and out. “That hurt,” he growls, and his face is like thunder.

“You deserve it,” Dean retorts pissily, and out of nowhere he finds his teeth are gritted with rage. “I am so fuckin’ mad at you, I could vaporize you where you stand.”

“Lie.”

He goggles. “No, it isn’t a fuckin’ lie. What the hell were you thinking, carving that thing into yourself if you knew damn well it—”

“Where I  _lie_ , Dean. Vaporize me where I  _lie_.”

Dean pulls up, flaps his lips for a minute. “Don’t split hairs,” he snaps childishly. “I am this far,” and he holds up thumb and forefinger for emphasis, “from grabbing you by both ears and driving your face into my knee.  _Twice_. And at least they can’t find you with that cut into your ribs.” 

Castiel is wincing, still patting at the bandages. “I can’t even rub it better, it hurts too much,” he mutters. “I had speculated whether I might be reborn as a human child when my fall was complete. Like Anna.” He gives Dean an opaque look. “Like you, Michael. And I had wondered if childhood might be a positive experience. But I remain an adult. And I’ve concluded that humanity is highly overrated.”

The first aid kit is sticking out from under the bed, and Dean leans down, hauls it out the rest of the way. “I thought I was a bad patient,” he grouses, flips the lid open. “And I didn’t fall. Not officially. And the only good thing about childhood is that you can be tried as a minor. You’re lucky you’re a grown-up, believe me.” He gestures at the other man’s chest. “Can you get those dressings off yourself? Only Bobby said they need changing and I—”

“Can barely stand the thought of touching me now I’m untouchable?”

Dean glances up again, can’t really find words to deny it because it’s true, and he knows Castiel can read him like a book so he doesn’t bother lying.

“It’s how Anna made me feel,” Castiel muses philosophically, and he’s already picking at the tape, plucking at the gauze patches covering his chest. “It is what it is.” 

Dean keeps schtum, focuses on ferreting through the supplies, rooting out clean gauze and antiseptic. “Use this spray stuff,” he says, squinting at the can as he stands. “It’ll be easier, and I’ll cut more tape so…” He looks across, falters. “Oh, for crying out loud,” he breathes. “You look like I drew on you with my left hand using a chainsaw. I knew it was a fuckin’ bad idea.” He spins, takes a few steps away, shields his face with his palms for a minute, and he can hear the spray fizz out, hear Castiel sucking in an outraged breath. And he turns back, plunks himself down in the chair again, snips tape and hands it up mutely, feels a sick sort of shame while he tries to avoid skin-to-skin contact.

Castiel finishes off, flops back on the pillows, scowls over at him suddenly.

“What?”

“I think I may need to, uh… use the facilities.”

The diversion is a relief. “You mean you need to take a piss? Come on, you were Jimmy Novak once weren’t you? You can speak like a normal hu—”

“Just because I’m human doesn’t mean I’m Jimmy again, Michael,” Castiel grates out, and then he pulls up, furrows his brow. “Dean. I mean.”

Dean nods slowly, considers that it feels so normal, so natural, to hear Castiel call him by his  _name_ , and he wonders if it’s some deeply buried memory from antiquity, a memory of Cas having used it before. But at the same time it prickles at him, feels like an itch he needs to scratch, nags at him because it’s still there in the back of his mind even with Gabriel’s reassurance echoing in there too, the thought that all he has ever been to Castiel is  _Michael_. “Do you see him when you look at me?” he asks suddenly. “Sam and Bobby, I think they see me… but they’re scared. And I think Sam’s – I dunno, trying to see under my skin or something. Analyzing me. But Gabriel – he said I was Michael to him. And that’s what he called me. And you did too. Is that who you see? Him?”

Castiel gives him a serious look. “I see what I’ve always seen,” he says carefully.

Jesus, Dean thinks, it’s like getting blood from a stone. “Which is?”

The response is simple, quiet. “The best man I know.”

Dean swallows hard, fights to keep his voice steady. “Come on. Bathroom’s up the—”

“Bucket,” Castiel says faintly. “Under the bed.  _Justincasey_. According to Bobby.” He groans out as he starts to push himself up, and Dean leans forward, reaches out to help, finds he can’t, feels that twist of revulsion clench his gut again, and he recoils, slams his butt back down in the chair.

“I’m an abomination to you now,” Castiel remarks offhandedly, as he maneuvers himself into a sitting position, pale faced and sweating.

“I’m sorry,” Dean whispers, and he can’t meet the other man’s gaze all of a sudden.

“You don’t have to be sorry. It’s how it works, we both know this. You’ll become inured to it at some point. I expect you already have with Sam.” Castiel swings his legs over the side of the bed. “Dean.”

He does glance up then, and Castiel is looking at him expectantly.

“Oh. Yeah.” He pokes about under the bedframe with his boot, slides the pail out, waits, and Castiel stares back at him some more.

“What?”

Castiel raises one eyebrow.

“Oh. Yeah.”

He swivels around in the chair, sniggers despite the whole aversion thing. “This is ridiculous. I’m the archangel Michael and I’m sitting here listening to my guardian angel piss in a bucket behind me. And this is all part of God’s plan.  _Oy_.”

He hears Castiel sigh out, because the angel is human now, and the pleasure of a bladder fit to bust finally emptying is right up there on the list. The bucket scrapes home, and he turns around again, and Castiel is shuffling himself back up onto the bed. 

“I’m no longer your guardian angel, Dean,” he says matter-of-factly. “In fact, these circumstances mean I’m less than nothing to you.” He groans as he rests back against the pillows. “So,” he offers then, and his mouth is suddenly a grim line. “You’re still considering destroying our brother.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “You were faking it just now too? Why the hell didn’t you—”

“You were having a  _moment_ ,” Castiel parries, air quotes and all. “For some of the time, at least. It seemed to be something Bobby needed, and something that comforted him.”

“How much of it did you hear?”

“All the good parts.”

Dean looks hard at the other man. “Honestly, Cas?” he says quietly. “All I really know is that the sun is going to switch off, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine either. Wars, plague, and upheaval of the elements prepare the way. It’s all destined. It’s God’s will, it’s written—”

“On the wind,” Castiel cuts in. “Written on the  _wind_ , Michael. Not in stone. And as for destiny…” He narrows his eyes, curls his lip insolently. “Don’t give me that holy crap. Destiny, God’s plan... it’s all a bunch of lies. A way for your boss to keep us in line.”

Dean cocks his head, quizzical, gets a sense of déjà vu, and he can’t quite pinpoint the reason why.

Castiel stops for a second, stares hotly, as only he can, and he’s smug with it before his expression melts into something more earnest. “Destiny isn’t real, Michael. But do you know what is? People. Families… that’s real. And you’re going to watch them all burn?”

And something clicks, and it dawns on Dean just why the words sound so familiar to him. “Your subtext is starting to sound way too much like text,” he breathes. “You’re a sneaky sonofabitch.”

“It’s been said,” Castiel retorts waspishly.

Dean folds his arms, clenches his teeth in irritation. “I swore my obedience,” he hisses. “Remember? Because I seem to recall that you were there for that. And it’s  _Dean_. The best man you know. In case that slipped your mind too.”

Castiel swallows hard, winces as he leans over to snag the bottle of water from the table beside the bed. He gulps a few mouthfuls, wipes his lips, and then he sags, suddenly drained and dejected. “It hasn’t slipped my mind,” he says dully. “It’s true. You are. And everything,  _everything_  I did was so this wouldn’t happen, and I did it because of you, because of what I learned from you.” He exhales heavily. “I chose _you_ , Dean. I killed for  _you_ ,fell for  _you_ , because I cared for you and believed in you, and what you said about this imperfect world. But now…” He laughs, and it’s hopeless. “All is wasted. Everything was to avoid this, and it’s wasted. It will all play out now like Zachariah intended, and I may as well have—”

“Left me in the green room?” Dean cuts in aggressively. “Left Sam to Lucifer? That was the plan wasn’t it, have that viper weasel his way into my brother and unleash Hell if I didn’t bend over and grip my ankles for you guys? Well, fuck that.” He shoots upright, strides over to the wall, slams his fist into it before he whirls back round again, and Castiel flinches in the face of his wrath.

“I didn’t ask you for anything except the chance to speak to my brother,” Dean rages, and he can feel his vocal chords cower as his voice turns jagged at the edges. “You made a choice, Cas, a hard choice, and I respect you for it. Fuck that – I love you for it. I do, and I think you know that.” He stabs the air with his finger, emphatic. “But it was  _your_  choice, _your_ free will, because it turns out you guys have that. I didn’t force you into it, or promise you anything. You did it because you knew it was right, and that Zachariah was wrong. So don’t lay it on me if it hasn’t all gone how you thought it would. That’s how the world works, Cas. I’m not in control, no one is. And you know what else? You don’t get to use your mojo to  _school me hard_  because you’re having a fuckin’ tantrum about not getting your way.”

He pulls up then, presses a hand to his brow, finds the hand is shaking, looks over to find Castiel gazing back, his expression flitting between something that might be fear and something that looks suspiciously like satisfaction, could be pleasure, might even be triumph veering into exultation. “What?” he snaps out, exasperated. “Why do you look like you just got one past me? Don’t I get any respect now I outrank you?”

Castiel smiles, just barely. “You’re right.”

And now he’s just confused. “Right… I’m right. Uh…  _I am?_ ”

The other man nods, and his eyes glow like he just got his grace back. “It  _was_  right, what I did. And Zachariah was wrong. And no one is in control. Because it turns out you guys have free will.”

Dean gapes back, shakes his head in wonder. “I just got served.”

“You just got served,” Castiel agrees, and he smirks. “There is no destiny but the one you make. You  _can_  choose to do those wrong things that are the right things. You  _can_  change it. And—”

“But you were there, Cas,” he jumps in hoarsely. “You were in Hell, you know what it’s like… Sam and Bobby, they have no clue. Lucifer wants to bring that here. And whose fault will it be if he does? Who will Sam and Bobby look to then? Assuming Sam is still Sam when the shit hits?” He shivers, bites his lip hard. “And that future Zachariah showed me… I told you what Lucifer said.” He pauses, lets the words sink in. “That we always end up there, no matter what we do.”

“But that future was a different reality, Dean,” Castiel offers. “One in which Michael didn’t—”

“But how do we know it doesn’t hang on  _this_  decision in  _this_ reality?” Dean cuts in, frustrated.

“Everything hangs on this decision, whatever you choose.” And Castiel smiles again. “But perhaps you know deep down that it’s a risk worth taking.”

Dean stands there, sighs out, pinches the bridge of his nose, closes his eyes on the world for a moment. “You know… I’m not tired, Cas, but I’m weary,” he murmurs finally. “These are the decisions you were talking about. The ones you said you didn’t envy.”

“I believe they are.”

“If I disobey, I risk falling.”

Castiel’s reply is quiet, but sure and honest. And meaningful. “Some things are worth the fall.”

Dean snorts. “Don’t even think about giving me one of your soulful looks.” He makes his way back to his chair. “And by the way, you’re looking to get schooled hard yourself.” He raises an eyebrow, turns on the smug himself. “You should show me some fuckin’ respect. I dragged you out of Hell and I can damn well throw you back in.”

“Touché.” There’s a moment of silence then, before Castiel clears his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says. “What I did to you… I hurt you, and it was wrong, it was—”

“What I would have done,” Dean cuts in levelly. “It was pissed off, it was mean as hell, and it was fuckin’ desperate. It was what I would have done.” He settles back, gazes reflectively into the middle distance for a long moment, decides it’s time to ask the question directly. “You said I was different.”

“I did,” Castiel says wearily. “You were. You are.”

Dean finds he’s chewing on the knuckle of his index finger, and he flicks his eyes up to meet the other man’s. “Did you know? When you said that, did you  _know?_ ” He asks, but he isn’t sure if he wants to hear the answer, because he knows Castiel won’t lie to him.

“I’m not sure,” comes the other man’s wary reply. “I just – there was something about you…”

Dean glances over, and now Castiel’s face is rapt. “Something wondrous, and terrifying,” he continues softly. “When I found you down there I felt that I already knew you, but I didn’t understand why or how. And I thought you would hear my true voice… and then when you didn’t, well.” He shrugs. “I assumed it was what we had shared down there that drew me to you.”

Dean shivers. “Yeah, it was one hell of a bonding experience,” he mutters. “Literally.”

“We searched for you for many long years, and he did his work well,” Castiel says. “Alastair. He hid you by corrupting you, by tarnishing your glow. But I found you.” He pauses, smiles, and his voice takes on a note of shy pride. “ _I_  found you. And I held your soul in my hands, and shielded you from him, and remade you. Because there was still a spark. Like a firefly. Like… Tinkerbell. And now I know why you shone so brightly.”

“Like  _Tinkerbell_?” And it’s a save, an out-clause, a relief, because the wistful, naked expression on Castiel’s face is doing odd, flip-flopping things to Dean’s heart, and it’s almost like he has never considered the enormity of it all, a battle raging to find him while he turned the devil’s work into an art form and took pride in his aptitude and finesse. “You’ve seen Peter Pan?” he trails off lamely.

Castiel shrugs. “Crappy motel. It was that or pay-per-view porn.”

Dean chews his lip. “I thought you were, you know…” he waves a hand up. “Flapping around up there all this time. Not bunking in crappy motels. And how do you even pay for those?”

“Not lately,” Castiel says reflectively. “It tires me.” He sighs. “ _Tired_  me. And I Obi-Wan the desk clerks.”

“You could have ridden with us.”

Castiel shakes his head ruefully. “Not while Zachariah could find me. Or Lucifer. It’s difficult to ward against an archangel for any length of time without these sigils. It would have put you at risk to spend long periods of time with you. Both of you. It’ll be easier now.”

Dean sniffs, doesn’t honestly want to think of the other man channel-surfing by himself in crappy motels because he was tired, it’s too keen a memory of solo vampire slaying, and Sam off God knew where, and his pathetic relief when his angel showed up to rouse him from his loneliness. He makes a sharp, snippy u-turn in the conversation. “So you are grateful for the sigils.”

There’s a long-suffering silence before a tart, “Thank you, Dean.”

Dean smirks, settles back in the chair again, considers the irony of it all. “Time travel, it’s – fuckin’ weird.” He shakes his head. “It’s just ironic. Anna went back to stop it. And all she did was flip the final switch. Jesus, she must be spinning in her grave.”

Castiel snorts, flaps a hand when Dean looks up. “You’re an odd thing,” he muses. “You’re just so –  _you_. Even though you’re him. It must be the extra archangel  _mojo_ … and the fact that Michael was reborn in you, took you when—”

Dean cuts in, testy. “There was no  _taking_. Or opening up, just in case you were thinking that too. I just – _acknowledged_. Okay?”

But Castiel is droning on, entranced. “The joining must be on some deeper level, there must be a synergy that comes from—”

“Enough,” Dean barks. “There’s no  _synergy_. Jesus you make it sound like a fuckin’ shampoo commercial.”

Castiel thinks on it a minute. “Well… perhaps more a symbiotic relationsh—”

“I’m not Teal’c,” Dean yelps. “There is no  _symbiote_.”

Castiel looks at him slitty-eyed, yawns hugely, and his face falls suddenly. “This, it’s – limiting,” he murmurs, looking down at himself. “We’re so screwed.”

Dean feels a rush of something, compassion, that same affection, love if he’s honest, that swelled in his chest before. He leans forward, rests his hand on the bed beside the other man’s, ignores the panic he feels at the proximity. “Look,” he says. “I get the hopelessness, but here we are and there’s no going back. We have to follow this through, and we have to hope it’ll work out because we don’t have anything else to hang it on. We are behind the eightball on this one, Cas.”

But Castiel is miles away, muttering to himself contemplatively, like he’s thinking aloud. “This body is frail, Michael, and I feel a ripped-out space inside, an absence of _self_ , where I once felt strong, and right, and certain. This, it’s –  _wrong_. It’s unbecoming, it’s unseemly… I’m trapped here now, earthbound, and tired, and _limited_ , and it isn’t what I am.” He closes his eyes, floats a hand up to cover his face, and he makes a muffled, choked sound behind it.

And God, but Dean knows what that ripped-out space feels like, and it’s reflexive for him to reach out for the hand that still rests next to his, and the easiest, most natural thing in the world for him to ignore the hiss of  _toxic_ , to grip the hand in his own fist and lean down onto Castiel’s knuckles. He presses them hard to his brow, and rubs his skin on them, and his eyes close, and he can feel his heart thud crazily against his ribs until it calms down and he shudders out relief.

“You aren’t less than nothing to me,” he mutters. “You’ll never be that.  _Never_. You saw me at my worst, and you never judged me. You thought I deserved to be saved, and you never abandoned me. You’re my brother. And you’re a better man than me. Jesus, Cas… it’s good to see you again.”

He feels the answering pressure of Castiel’s hand, hears him speak, low and solemn.

“Your mark was always on my soul, Dean.”

***

__  


  
Continued in chapter 3   


  



	3. Unspeakable Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers up to S6; AU after Point of No Return

At some point Castiel surges up on a choked-off scream and fishes his arms through the air. He sucks in huge gulps of oxygen, sobs it back out again, and his eyes are wild and horrified, but they stare at nothing. And Dean is ready, is sitting by the bed waiting for precisely this, because he remembers this kind of blind hysteria, remembers the few times Castiel hid him from his memories in dreamless sleep, and it’s high time he repaid that favor. He leans across, touches his fingertip lightly to the other man’s brow, eases him back down onto the pillow. And now he can leave.

The house is still except for the sound of the clock in the hallway as he makes his way outside. He stands in the lot and regards his baby for a couple of minutes, three hundred twenty seven cubic inches, four barrel, two hundred seventy five crazy horses under her hood, stamping their hooves and champing at the bit, his own personal Sherman tank. And he ranges up alongside her, trails a gentle finger along her cold metal skin, and fancies that she shivers at his touch. “Sorry darlin’,” he murmurs down at her. “Not this trip.”

He looks up, thinks about what Sam said about flying, thinks about how he’s  _of the air_  now, wonders idiotically if he really does need to flap, or maybe run, like he’s flying a kite. He tries to remember what Castiel did when he whisked him to Shoshoni, but all he remembers is a fraction of a second of soft velvet blackness, of being held close, and safe. Encased in wings, he supposes.

He doesn’t really know how he does it, but in that instant he falls into the sky. He feels his stomach drop down to his boots, finds he’s hollering out his exhilaration as plush, fat clouds like the ones he’s seen in Bobby’s books of nautical paintings race up to swallow him whole, and he’s surrounded by gossamer mist and fog as they explode moistly on his face. He’s weightless, and he wafts and drifts about, swoops, falls, floats, soars under the stars as they wink a greeting, hangs suspended in the atmosphere, feels its pressure as it cushions him. He savors the icy cold, how the wind howls in his ears, forces its way into him, into his nose and mouth, and it’s like drowning on air. He looks down and sees the wisp of clouds, the swirling blue of the great lakes, and it suddenly occurs to him just why he always hated flying, and he knows now that it wasn’t the flying he hated at all, it was the confinement, the steel capsule, the unnaturalness of manufactured flight when it was his nature to do this. And he dives and wheels, lets the wind lift him, harvests its energy, glides along on its crest so all he’s doing is steering.

It’s like he isn’t real anymore, like he’s a ghost, and this is how it was meant to be for him. It’s peaceful, and he can see for miles. And he wonders why he never asked Cas how it felt, and deep down under his joy he feels a stab of sorrow for the fact his brother will never see the earthrise again.

***

Sam comes round gradually, hears birdsong, squints blearily at his wristwatch, groans, does the math. “Twelve hours,” he says to the room. “Well. Guess I needed it.” He feels curiously unhurried as he sits up, sees the notepaper taped to the door, and he pads over, unsticks it, reads his brother’s terse scrawl.

 _I’ll be back_.

He shrugs, hefts his duffel, makes his way to the bathroom, beats his morning wood into submission in the shower while he rolls his eyes at the sheer nerve of the biological imperative at a time like this,  _it’s the end of the world, must jack off_ , and then wonders with damned careful scientific detachment if his brother is junkless now.

The house is dead silent when he creaks down the stairs twenty minutes later, and he sticks his nose around the door to the den, sees Castiel sprawled out on the bed, dead to the world, and Bobby’s socked foot hanging over the edge of the couch arm. Breakfast, and he vacuums down a stack and a side of bacon, coffee,  _thank God_ , rustles up a couple of extra plateloads and a tray and totes it all back up the hallway, deposits it on the desk. “Rise and shine,” he barks without ceremony, as he sweeps the curtains open.

Castiel jolts awake, pushes up on his elbows. He grimaces as he moves, but his eyes are brighter and he has some color in his cheeks.

“You look better, dude,” Sam offers.

“I feel it. And you look better too, Sam.” Castiel is almost cheery, eyes the plates avidly. “Is that food? Food that isn’t ground beef?”

Sam dutifully parks one of the loaded platters on the bed next to him, rolls his eyes as the man starts wolfing the contents down.

Castiel looks up, cheeks stuffed. “Dean told me you were as bad a cook as was possible without being hazardous,” he remarks. “But this is extremely good.” He nods at Sam’s cup. “That coffee? I think I should try some.”

Sam hands it over. “Have at it.”

Bobby is staring up at him owlishly.

“Grub’s up,” Sam says helpfully, jerks a thumb over at the tray.

“When did you cut your hair?”

Sam frowns. “What are you talking about? I didn’t cut my hair.”

Castiel snorts behind him. “Dean healed it.”

Sam gapes, pats at his head. “Dean…  _healed_ it?”

The other man nods. “I healed Sam’s hair. Those were his exact words.” He stares at Sam critically. “I mean it, you look better,” he declares. “It was –  _not good_. Before.” He brightens. “It was a hair-don’t.”

“Mirror,” Sam yelps, and he skids out into the hallway, hears Bobby call after him.

“Could be worse, kid, he could’ve buzzed you. God knows I would’ve.”

It isn’t as bad as he feared, a good two inches shorter, and what the hell, he’s been meaning to do it anyway. He wonders idly if Dean did it with his magic finger or whether he conjured up scissors and a comb and took advantage of Sam’s enchanted sleep to style it just so, trim the bangs in there. “Where is he anyway?” he asks, as he walks back into the den, scrubbing at his eyes. “Jesus, I feel like he drugged me or something. I slept like the dead.”

Castiel nods seriously. “I also slept heavily,” he deadpans. “I suspect Dean made use of his magic finger.”

Sam shudders. “That’s just – that’ll never come out right, Cas,” he says. “Don’t forget, I’ve seen the way you look at him.”

Castiel quirks his mouth up. “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” he concedes simply.

Bobby is standing by the window, chomping on a strip of bacon. “And screw you very much for jamming that song in my head,” he growls balefully. “You sound like a fuckin’ Valentine. Get over him, for Christ’s sake.” He glances back at Sam, frowns. “I thought he was upstairs with you?”

Sam shakes his head. “No. There’s a note.  _I’ll be back_.”

“Well, his car’s outside,” the old man notes.

There’s a long, pregnant pause, and Castiel’s eyes grow huge and alarmed, and his voice is strained when he breaks the silence. “He doesn’t need to use his car any more. Bobby…”

Sam looks from the bed to the old man, back again to where Castiel is glowering at Bobby, and he can see eyeball messages are zinging back and forth between the two of them like ping pong balls. He slaps his hand on the desk. “What the hell is going on?”

Cas rubs his hand on his brow, his previous cheer suddenly blanketed with gloom. “Pestilence.”

Sam nods. “Yeah, that’s the plan. Dean said he was about to launch Croatoan in a big way, so I’m guessing that…” He trails off under Castiel’s stare. “He’s gone after him. By himself.”

Bobby spits out a muffled curse, rounds on the man in the bed. “Can he do that?”

Cas shrugs. “He’s the archangel Michael,” he retorts witheringly. “He’s running this show. He can do whatever he wants.”

“And you didn’t try and talk him out of it?”

“He didn’t tell me he was planning to go anywhere,” Castiel snaps. “And even if he did, there isn’t anything I could have done about it.” He holds up his hand, wiggles the digits. “Magic finger, remember?”

Sam roots out his cell, flips it open, presses it to his ear, and a few feet away his brother’s ringtone grinds out, and his heart sinks as his eyes scope the room.

Castiel reaches over to the table, holds up what he seeks. “My other one didn’t make it back,” he announces. “Dean gave me this so he could reach me if he needed to.” He taps a finger on his chest. “Sigils.”

And now Sam finds himself pacing, rubbing at his jaw. “He never told me what Brady said… where Pestilence is. Bobby? Anything? Cas?”

“He told me strange things were afoot at the Circle K, and that’s the last thing I remember,” Castiel says, and he bites on his lip. “You want to go after him.”

“You’re damn right,” Bobby says harshly, as he heaves open his desk drawer, starts rummaging. “Let’s mount up.”

Sam throws up his hands. “And go where? We don’t know where he is.”

“We’ve got a lead,” Bobby snaps. He finds what he’s looking for, waves it at Sam. “Brady’s wallet, remember?” He fishes out a business card. “Vice-President of distribution, Nivaeus Pharmaceuticals.” He scowls. “It’s worth a shot. It sounds like the perfect place for Pesky to mix up a few vats of his Satan bug for mass consumption. We need to hit the road, Detroit’s a long drive.”

Sam’s mouth goes dry at the memory of Lucifer’s words to him, and he rasps it out dry and cracked. “Detroit? It’s in Detroit?”

Bobby is already halfway to the door. “Yep, so come on, we’ll need to—”

“Perhaps it isn’t a good idea,” Cas cuts in, and Sam shoots his eyes over at the other man because his voice is  _Castiel’s_ voice, it’s calm, it’s confident, it’s self-assured, it’s authoritative. “Going in mob-handed could lead Pestilence to take action, release the virus. You could be infected. And Lucifer could be there.” Castiel cocks his head, eyes Sam critically. “He’ll be even more intent on acquiring his true vessel now.”

Sam swallows thickly, makes his voice as firm as he can. “I’m immune to the virus, Cas,” he says. “You must know that. And I don’t think they can just release it anyway, it isn’t airborne… at least it wasn’t in Concrete.” He glances across to Bobby, back again, and now Castiel is giving him a flat, skeptical look, and it’s as if the other man knows exactly what the devil said to Sam in that field in the dark. He reaches up to his temples, rubs them hard. “Look, Cas. I get it,” he defends. “I know Dean thinks I’ll say yes if Lucifer gets to me, I know you probably do too. I know why… I know I let Ruby play me like a fiddle. But it isn’t going to happen. Can you just… have some faith in me? Believe in me?  _Please?_ ”

Castiel is tired-looking, pale, bruised, but his eyes are still appraising Sam, and his look is  _knowing_ , and there’s a second when Sam thinks he’s the strongest thing in the room still. “If my brother has gone to speak with Pestilence alone, then he has his reasons,” he says.

Sam nods slowly. “He’s my brother too, Cas,” he says quietly. “And that’s my reason.”

Castiel starts to speak, hesitates, and his features soften. He nods slowly. “In that case…” He pushes upright, with a pained wince. “Clothes,” he announces. “I need some.”

***

There’s something to be said for the whole hand, Dean muses, and he thinks he could damn well get used to this as he exorcises his nth black-eyed bastard without his pulse rate rising at all. He peers behind the slumped body into the dimly lit office and it’s just more lab equipment, machinery, vials, and he thinks maybe it was a tad dense of him to assume it was going to be behind a door marked  _Croatoan_ , in boxes clearly marked  _Croatoan_. And he resolves to grab one of the goons and spend a few minutes sweating it out of him or else he’ll be here  _all fuckin’ night_ , because he can’t figure out if it’s Horseman mojo or not, but knowing it all doesn’t seem to be working any more. He sighs, thinks he maybe should have asked Gabriel what the prank’s use-by date was, briefly wonders where the little prick beamed to, and refuses to feel even a shred of guilt for clicking him out of this dimension.

He sneaks along the hallway, wrinkles his nose up because he can smell something vaguely familiar that isn’t the stench of the Pit, and he can’t put a finger on what it is. He pushes open another door, flips the light switches, and finds himself goggling idiotically into one of the outside hangars, and palate after palate piled with boxes clearly marked  _Croatoan_.

“Jackpot,” he breathes, and he takes a few steps further in, raises his magic hand, and it overpowers him, pungent, like wacky baccy, joss sticks, incense, and he spins around but it’s too late, as the holy fire flares around him and the flames curl up gracefully, lazily.  _Fuckin’ amateur_ , he thinks.

“I smelled you coming, Clarice,” says the tall, skinny bald guy on the safe side of the fire. The tall, skinny bald guy on the safe side of the fire holding a vicious looking crossbow, and he’s loading up a bolt daubed red at the tip. And it turns out Pestilence has a sense of humor, because the unmistakable rumbling bass baritone of the man in black suddenly resounds through the room.

“Ring of Fire,” Dean spits out. “ _Fuck_.”

“Language, Michael.”

The man smiles amiably, and Dean thinks the teeth might be false, there are just too-perfect-many of them for authenticity.

“Can we talk?” the man says, and his voice is like cat claws snagging the upholstery. “Only I hear things. I heard you let your guard down, that you’ve been a bad son… pulling your pet grunt out of the hot box.” He  _tsks_ , shakes his head in disapproval. “Overly emotional. It’s making you weak. Your halo is slipping and your fall is assured, just as his was when he began to care too much. You care too much for your brothers, Michael. All of them… even the one you will kill.” He motions over Dean’s shoulder then. “And now you come to take what’s mine…” he says, almost dreamily. “The fruits of my labor, and you think you can just destroy the life I created—”

“Death,” Dean says coldly. “The  _death_  you created.” He meets the man’s empty eyes without blinking. “Don’t tell me you’re having a dad of the year moment over a fuckin’ disease.”

Pestilence stares balefully at him. “Not just a disease, Michael,” he hisses. “ _War_. Plague, cholera, typhoid, malaria… germs are my warfare. Man defeats smallpox, polio emerges… polio is all but beaten, then comes HIV… and now my new personal favorite, swine flu. And my vaccine.”

Dean can’t help feeling a grudging admiration for the guy’s nerve. “You’re marketing this as a  _vaccine_?” He shakes his head. “Well, I have to hand it to you. That takes balls that clang.”

The Horseman’s sheer glee bursts out of him. “My ingenuity amazes even me,” he crows in agreement. “Viruses are a predator, the  _perfect_  predator, evolving and mutating and reproducing without needing sustenance… they are the unseen foe, the crushing defeat, the loss, the hardship of war… and then comes the relief, the joy, as the cure, the _vaccine,_ is finally discovered and you exterminate the enemy. Only in this case, not so much.” He bares his teeth in a deadly smile. “Man thinks he has mastered nature and all her weapons, but he has not mastered disease and its terrible, beautiful,  _pristine_  destruction—”

Dean cuts him off with a snort. “You done monologuing? Only I have two words for you.” He smirks. “Hand sanitizer.”

The man stares at him, a flat, relentless stare, before he smiles again, and his voice is jovial. “Michael, I’m going to share something with you that’s going to make our time together extra-special.”

“You don’t say,” Dean snaps back.

“I do say,” the man replies, smiling even wider. “Your brother summoned me on a beautiful crisp day out in the countryside, with not a soul in sight but for this handy meatsuit, who was out in the sticks with a packed lunch, a pair of binoculars, and his National Audubon Society backpack. Any idea as to what he was doing?”

Dean stares back. “I couldn’t begin to guess.”

The man flashes his many false teeth in a grin that splits his face in half. “He was birdwatching. He’s an ornithologist. With an impressively large collection of our feathered friends sitting in glass cases back at the homestead, because when he isn’t watching birds, he’s using this…” He pauses to admire the crossbow, before turning his attention back. “…To shoot them out of the sky so he can stuff and mount their dead bodies.” He pauses, studies Dean, rakes his body with his eyes, and his eyes drift higher. “Your wings,” he breathes out in awe. “They are a thing of beauty.”

Dean cocks his head, quizzical despite himself.

“Oh yes, I see them,” the man confirms enthusiastically. “They’re glorious…” He furrows his brow. “High aspect ratio wings, if I’m not mistaken. Like a seabird.” He nods thoughtfully. “I think you fall under albatross, Michael. The albatross around my master’s neck, in fact.” He sighs. “Such beautiful feathers…” His voice is oily, flesh-creeping, seductive, as he gazes off to Dean’s right.

And Dean watches the man’s arm rise slowly, thinks ruefully that it’s inevitable, braces himself for the impact because it’s point-blank range, and he hears the bolt  _phhhtt_  out at him. It slams into his shoulder and he staggers with the force, reaches up instinctively to grab a hold of the inch or so that protrudes. “It doesn’t even hurt,” he sneers, as his legs buckle and he crashes down onto his knees, and they don’t hurt either.

“Oops,” the Horseman says, and he raises his hand to his face, presses his fingers over his smirk. “With my crossbow, I shot the albatross.” And he steps forward, slashes a hand through the air, and the flames part for him.

It’s weird, Dean thinks as he lies there, because the man’s face is looming up and then away, and then he has several faces and they’re zapping about all over the place with all sorts of weird laser light effects, and he snorts out a laugh because it’s so seventies-Queen-video it’s funny. And then, in the next second, he’s curling in on himself as fire streaks from his shoulder up to his brain and behind his eyes, a nuclear white-out strobing across his line of sight, and wailing siren pain, party popper pain that bangs like a gunshot and trails streamers and confetti in every corner of his mind, and he sucks in a shuddering breath as he shivers and shakes with it, poison sizzling through his veins.

“I mixed this cocktail especially for you, Michael,” the Horseman whispers in his ear. “It’s the Coca-Cola formula, chickadee, a closely held trade secret… it’s Colonel Sanders’ secret mix of eleven herbs and spices, with a little squirt of demon blood in there to bind it all together…”

Dean can feel a hand on his shoulder, feel a stretching sensation, something being pulled out of him and the hand caressing, stroking, exploring, tickling, squeezing, testing, and he chokes out some noise of protest that isn’t proper words.

“Such beautiful feathers,” the voice hisses. “So soft… and how they glow… oh, such beautiful feathers.” The man’s hand twists Dean’s head around and he’s staring up into savage gimlet eyes. “Did you know these flight feathers here along your wings are called remiges, Michael? These longest, narrowest ones, just here… Oh, what am I thinking? You can’t see…” And then a sting that shocks a yelp out of him, and there it is, held lovingly in Pestilence’s hand, a shimmering bronze plume, a good two feet in length, and it does glow, but it’s hazy because his eyes are blurred with rage.

“This is a primary flight feather, Michael,” the man says admiringly. “They’re your principle source of thrust as you fly. They’re flexible at the tip here, see?” He proves it, prods the tip upwards. “When you spread those upwards it reduces drag.”

“Fuck you,” Dean manages to grind out through the burn that still shreds his nerve endings. “ _Fuck_.  _You_.”

Pestilence shakes his head, makes a clucking sound. “Feisty,” he remarks, and he sits back on his butt, folds his arms. “I worry about that, Michael, I worry that you might panic, hurt yourself. You could fly into the window, fly into the ceiling fan. What if you land on the hot stove top? Get trapped behind the refrigerator? Land in the toilet bowl and drown?” He lowers his brows, earnest and sympathetic. “The world is a lethal place for caged birds. You could break your wings, even.”

And he flashes a hand out, clicks his fingers, and he’s holding a pair of gardening shears. “I think we should clip your wings. Strictly for safety, of course.” And then his face gets thoughtful. “Or maybe we should pinion them.” He smiles whitely. “Do you know what pinioning is, Michael? It means surgically removing the pinion joint here on the wing, to prevent flight. Think of it like…” His face lights up. “Removing your hand at the wrist!”

Dean freezes, feels cold terror now, as the man scissors thin air dramatically and the steel snip-snaps greedily up there just past his line of sight. The man moves behind him,  _snip-snap_ , and he hears him mutter an oath,  _oops, got a couple of blood feathers there_ , and now Dean can smell copper and he cries out in confusion and distress as sharp, brutal pain starts to ripple across his shoulders. 

He hears laughter pealing out above him. “After all these years, now I know why the caged bird sings,” Pestilence taunts.

Then it slams into him, and he’s been shot, stabbed, bitten, cauterized, electrocuted, hung, flogged and worse in this dimension, and there aren’t words for what was done to him in the Pit, but this agony is unbearable because it tears and rends and distorts him like Alastair did, defiles his grace, and he’s struck dumb, speechless with the horror of it. And in the midst of it there’s a memory just there: of a mute four-year-old with a stomach upset weeping silent tears, of Bobby frantically drawing varying degrees of sad, mad, crying faces on paper and getting him to point because he couldn’t speak, _hurts, hurts more, hurts even badder, hurts a whole lot, hurts worst_.

And he can hear himself stutter it inside his head, _hurtsworsthurtsworsthurtsworst_ …

***

Bobby watches the building through his binoculars, purses his lips, and Sam can’t help twisting around to glance back at Castiel, sitting in the back, legs bent and feet on the seat so he can hug his knees, nose pressed up against the glass as he gazes out into the rain. He’s dressed in Dean’s jeans and battered Converse sneakers, and swamped by Sam’s hoodie, because without Jimmy Novak’s trench and suit jacket it turns out Cas is pretty skinny. “I’m getting a funny feeling,” he breathes out, and his brow furrows.

Bobby glances back and his voice is gruff. “If you’re gonna puke, open the door. Dean won’t want it on the leather.”

And Castiel is still staring, still frowning.

“You mean you’re getting a funny feeling about Dean?” Sam asks urgently. “That he’s in there? Can you tell where he might—”

“I think he’s getting a funny feeling about me.”

Sam recoils as the demon smiles in at him through the open window. “How the hell did you know where to find us?” he spits.

Crowley  _tsks_  and shakes his head. “Well, you’re hardly inconspicuous, are you? You need a Camry or something. Those champagne colored ones all the crumblies drive, so you’ll blend in better. How the old bill hasn’t caught up with you boys before now is beyond me. Can I come in?” He looks up, grimaces. “It’s chucking it down out here.”

Sam blinks, and now the voice is coming from behind and he twists again, and Crowley is settling himself comfortably in the back, flicking raindrops off his coat sleeve, nodding towards Castiel. “The boyfriend made it, I see.”

Castiel’s expression races from puzzled through distaste via guilt and embarrassment to mildly horrified, all in the space of half a second. “I can assure you, I—”

Crowley waves a dismissive hand. “No need, my friend, I bat for the other side myself.” He turns his eyes front and smirks at Sam. “Cas here might still have some juice, you know,” he says amiably. “He still smells like a rose.” He winks at Bobby. “You called, Robert?”

Sam goggles for a second, “He did?” before he glares at the old man. “You  _did_?”

Bobby has the good grace to look shifty. “Dean said he’s on the level,” he mutters. “And he’s one of them, which means he’s immune to anything Pestilence might be brewing. I asked him to scout ahead.”

Sam grits his teeth. “But how do we know—”

“You don’t,” Crowley cuts in acidly. “And if you want to sit here arguing the toss all night that’s fine by me, but you should know that your brother’s in there with Pestilence, who, by all accounts, is totally  _hatstand_. I mean…” He shudders. “He even gives me the abdabs and I was watching from a distance.”

Castiel clears his throat, glances at Sam. “Is Lucifer in there with them?” he asks tensely.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Crowley replies smoothly. “My guess is no, because Lucifer wants Michael all to himself and there’s no way he’d stand for Pestilence fluffing him ahead of the money shot. And it’s in danger of turning into an all-nighter if we don’t do something about it. So what’s the plan?” He looks expectantly at Sam, swivels his eyes to Bobby. “In your own time, gents,” he snaps out sardonically, and then, after another moment of silence, “Answers on a postcard, please.” 

Sam swallows thickly. “I’m getting my brother,” he replies hoarsely. “That’s the plan.” He flicks his gaze to Castiel. “Is Pestilence stronger than Michael? Can he hurt him?”

Castiel doesn’t reply, and his silence speaks volumes.

“Dean said the Horsemen are on the same pay grade,” Bobby mutters. “I’m assuming that means they can handle whatever Michael might throw at them.”

Crowley snorts. “Which wasn’t much, from what I could see on the monitor. I’m not too optimistic, quite frankly. He looked cattled. So?” He waits another few seconds, rolls his eyes irritably. “Bell-ends,” he snaps. “All of you. Come on, we’ll just have to blag it. I’ll disable the alarm sys—”

“Can you disable the sprinklers too?” Castiel cuts in. “We intend torching the virus if we can find where it’s stored.”

Crowley shakes his head in exasperation, before he exhales sharply and switches his face to thoughtful. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” he muses, and then his tone is decisive. “We should nuke the joint. Place is demon central, it’s like Wolfram and Hart in there.” He pauses at Sam’s look. “What? I liked that show.”

Sam huffs out a frustrated sound. “How can we destroy an entire building? We only have a few sticks of dynamite.”

The demon smiles brightly. “Furnace room,” he replies. “It’ll be in the basement. All we have to do is bugger up the pressure valves on the water heaters, tuck your dynamite somewhere handy, and boom.” He flares his fingers in the air for emphasis, waggles his eyebrows. “Lot of chemicals in there. Should be nicely flammable once we light it all up.”

Sam chews his lip, stares at Bobby for a minute, and the old man nods just barely. “It could work,” he says. “You get your brother, and then get the hell out. Call me when you’re clear.” He glances back at Castiel. “He stays with the car. I’ll get the boilers.”

Crowley claps his hands together, rubs them enthusiastically. “We’re all set then, lads. Meet me in the lobby.”

He vanishes, and Castiel looks from the empty space beside him to Sam. “Now I know how you feel,” he says dryly, before he squints out the car window towards the building. “There he is.” He shrugs at Sam’s expression. “I seem to still have freakishly acute senses.”

Sam leans across Bobby, reaches for the binoculars, and the old man snatches them away, glues them to his eyes. He flinches. “Jesus.  _Ouch_.”

“What?” Sam demands. “What do you see?”

“I’ll put it this way,” the old man growls. “The coast is clear.”

Sam creaks the car door open, and stops as he feels a hand on his arm. Bobby, and the old man’s eyes are worried.

“Sam,” he says softly. “Just.” His mouth is a grim line. “If anything happens, if we get split up… just say no, boy. Okay?”

He nods. “And you run like hell, Bobby.” He hauls his pack up from the footwell, steps out into the rain and starts walking, and he hears a voice call out behind him. Castiel ranges up behind him, ahead of Bobby, out of breath, a hand pressed to his chest. He groans, and Sam has to support him for a minute, until he’s able to stand up and his breathing is easier.

“I just wanted to…” He stops, and his eyes are huge in the darkness. “Sam, knowing the path doesn’t mean you have to walk it,” he says quietly. “If anything happens, you have to be strong. Lucifer will be –  _persuasive_. He will tempt you. But I do have faith in you. I want you to know that.”

And Sam is taken aback, and he flounders for a moment, looks down at his boots. “Dean doesn’t seem to think I’m strong enough,” he blurts out. “I know he has good reasons, but…” He trails off for a moment and Castiel stares back at him, silent. “You should get back in the car,” Sam says. “That’s what we agreed. You aren’t up to this.”

The other man nods, and Sam half turns to keep walking.

“Wait, Sam.”

He glances back, and Castiel is still rooted to the spot, scratching his head.

“It’s not Dean who has no faith in you,” he says after a second’s pause. “It’s Michael… the part of Dean that’s Michael is repelled by you, just like it’s repelled by me, for my fall.” And then he makes a frustrated noise. “No, that’s not – I mean, Michael is repelled by the part of you that is Lucifer… no, not that either… I mean the part of you that has the _potential_  to be Lucifer.” He grimaces. “I’m not making a very good job of this.”

And Sam ponders it for a second, thinks it makes sense given his brother’s sheer bipolarness over Ruby, and the stench of his demon taint now he can smell it. “No,” he breathes out. “You are making a good job of it. It explains a lot.”

“But?”

“I don’t think it’s just Michael, Cas,” he says. “Before Van Nuys, Dean said – he said they’d find a way to turn me. He said he  _knew_  they would. And it was like he really did know.” He looks down at his boots again, and when he looks up Castiel doesn’t meet his gaze. And Sam suddenly remembers the look the other man gave him before, the look that said he damn well knew why Dean took off to hunt Pestilence alone, the look that said he damn well knew what Lucifer said about Detroit. “Do you know something, Cas?” he fishes.

Castiel stares back steadily. “You’ll have to ask Dean,” he says noncommittally. “I’m sorry, Sam. He told me in confidence.”

Sam nods slowly, eyeballs Castiel for another minute. “Do you think he’ll do it?” he asks. “Michael… do you think he’ll fight? Toast us all?”

Castiel shifts uncomfortably, bites his lip.

“Cas, come on,” Sam says. “Give me something. Anything.”

“Spring Valley,” the other man zips out abruptly. “Do you remember Spring Valley?”

“You mean that Samhain mess?”

Castiel nods. “Dean chose to save the town, Sam. It was a test. So I was told at the time. He did the right thing then.”

And now Sam has a hundred questions bustling through his brain, and he wonders if Castiel can tell, because suddenly the other man is staring at the ground. “Look. I get that could mean something, but has he said anything to you at all, anything _definitive_?” Sam waits a beat. “Anything definitive that he might not have said to me?”

Castiel looks up at him again, and his face stays neutral but Sam can see it start to go up in his eyes, brick by brick, the wall of devotion and loyalty that means he will only ever really be Dean’s, even if he reaches out to the boy with demon blood from time to time. He knows he should have expected it.

“I don’t know what he’ll do,” Castiel says. “And you have no conception of what you’re asking him to risk by not fighting. You don’t know what Hell on earth means, Sam. Neither does Bobby. You should keep that in mind. And be careful in there.”

And he spins and walks back to the car, hunched up against the rain.

***

Pestilence hacks pieces off him and scatters them, so that when Dean sees past the blur in his eyes he’s focusing on gobs of ivory cartilage and bloody muscle that sprout tattered plumage and look like roadkill. They make him think of Hell, even though it isn’t quite the same because the Horseman isn’t as skilled a surgeon as he was down there. And after a while Pestilence snarls his toothy smile right down level with Dean’s face and drones on about all the plans he has for Michael’s feathers: a Harry Potter quill pen, a tickling stick, a feather duster, a bookmark, a feather keychain charm, a nature collage with a few acorns and twigs in the mix, a dream catcher, and he’ll laminate the smaller, softer, fluffier ones onto postcards with that poem about angel feathers and distribute them at the local nursing home.

“Just call me the pheasant plucker,” he burbles merrily, and he plants his hand down right next to Dean on the floor.

“I bet you can’t say that in German,” Dean slurs, and he’s cobra swift as he strikes. He closes his hand around the meatsuit’s wrist, twists him down, heaves his body up and on top, with a groan of effort, and Pestilence bucks like a mustang, starts frothing at the mouth and sliding on the pooled blood as his indignation ratchets up to anger and then violent fury.

The poison in his system seems to have solidified his mojo because it sure as fuck isn’t flowing up and out through his magic finger, and Dean finds he’s blinking back tears at the searing pain in his back, across his shoulders, as he reaches desperately for his boot, for his Bowie,  _do it the old-fashioned way_. And now all those teeth are glittering at him, and the violent spasms are winding down, and Pestilence brays out laughter right into his face because he knows all he has to do is wait. Well  _fuck that_ , Dean thinks, because he’s the badass motherfucker apex predator in this fight. He slams his head down into the teeth, once, twice, three times, feels them shatter under the final blow. And he cackles, and now he wrestles the meatsuit’s hand up, up,  _up_ , to his face, and he smiles his own megawatt smile.

“I’m the Hannibal Lecter in this relationship, asswipe,” he hisses.

He thinks he might see it starting to dawn in the Horseman’s eyes as he drags the hand closer, and now the struggle is starting up again under him so he’s dizzy with the buffeting. But he’s holding on fast and tight, ignoring the clamor, closing his jaws around the knuckle, and he can taste his own blood on the meatsuit’s skin. He grips, saws his teeth down through ligaments and muscle and bone, until he feels them meet in the middle and his molars grind against the metal of the ring. And then he pulls, whipping his head from side to side like a shark feeding, as he rips, tears, feels it give, and wrenches it free to a howl of rage.

And now he has the power back, and he leers down. “Finger food,” he rasps out around the bloody digit, still held firm between his teeth. “We’re done here, Ponyboy.”

The Horseman is frothing bloodily at the mouth, shrilling out distress, and Dean ignores it, ignores the pain, slams his palm down on the meatsuit’s brow, dredges up something, _anything_ , feels a lethargic buzz gooseflesh its way along his arm. And there’s no comparison with before, it’s the difference between pitching the power out of himself at one hundred ten miles per hour, like Nuke LaLoosh, and rolling it sedately along the driveway so some drooling toddler can field it and roll it back. But  _thank Christ_  it’s effective, and he flops down through a foot of thin air to the floor.

He can hear the whistle and wheeze of his own breath as it comes fast and feverish, and he pushes up onto his hands and knees, spits the ragged chunk of flesh out onto the floor. He pats his way over to it, picks it up gingerly, and his hand is shaking so badly he can barely hold onto it. He lurches up to his feet, windmills his arms for a few seconds trying to stay balanced. And the room spins and tumbles around him, and he poleaxes, crashing down onto his back, and the agony shrieks through him before it all fades out.

***

“Is there a floor map?” Sam says in a loud whisper, as Crowley marches across the glass and modern art stripe-and-blotch canvassed lobby, stepping over the sprawled forms of what looks like Security, lying there with wide scarlet smiles gaping under their chins.

The demon nods down the hallway. “We don’t need one,” he says blithely. “We just follow the trail of crumbs.”

And there they are, crumpled bodies dotting the polished floor at random intervals, staring up at nothing, open mouthed in sheer annoyance, and all with a sooty burn on their brows.

“And we’re walking…” Crowley gestures at the bodies like he’s narrating a White House tour, even turns and sidles along backwards as he describes the view. “As you can see, your brother was doing quite well at first,” he confides knowledgeably. “I reckon our equine friend lulled him into a false sense of security with all this cannon fodder though, and then it went arse over tip.” He sniffs. “Looks like even Michael isn’t above a bit of hubris. He flew too close to the sun this time, that’s for sure.” He points to a desk at the top of the hallway. “I got as far as there, saw them on one of the monitors.”

Sam jogs up there, ever watchful, leans down and scans the small screens as they cycle through empty labs, offices, hallways. Nothing. “Which one?” he demands urgently. “Which one did you see him on?”

Crowley frowns, ponders it.

“Jesus, Crowley, come on, I don’t—”

The demon winces, stabs a finger to the left. “There. That one. I think. Hangar something or other. And must you keep saying the J word?”

Sam leans forward, observes some more, taps out his frustration on the wood veneer of the desk as the monitor loops through its sequence, until there it is. “Hangar four. It’s the only one on this monitor… it must be at the back, they’d need parking lot access for moving stuff in and out.”

He shrugs off his duffel, cracks open his shotgun, double checks for shells, all present and correct, kneels down and fishes out a fully stocked bandolier, slings it around his neck. “Are you sure all the alarms are tripped?” he asks, as he roots about again. He hauls out Bobby’s street sweeper, and feeds his arm through the strap so the gun lies against his back.

“I’m a professional,” Crowley says witheringly. “Give me some credit. I learned this from the Kray twins.”

Sam stands up, eyes Crowley with a measured stare, wonders if he can risk giving the demon a gun.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Crowley says, and he folds his arms, leans back on the desk. “But I’m not going anywhere near Champion the Wonder Horse. I think you can handle it, all Ramboed up.” He motions at the gun. “Much as I like the pretty, pretty weapons of mass destruction, I think it’s better if I keep watch.” And he smirks. “From all the way back here.”

Sam rolls his eyes, thinks ruefully that it’s probably for the best anyway, because the last time he trusted a demon to watch his back it started this whole mess. He steels himself, and slips stealthily up and around the corner towards the back of the building.

A couple more turns and a dead end later there it is, and now he can smell that weird church smell, incense, remembers it from Providence, the murdered priest,  _there’s no such thing as angels, Sam_. It sends a chill running up his spine, because now he can hear Father Reynolds, as clear as if he just spoke,  _the archangel Michael, with the flaming sword… the fighter of demons, holy force against evil, God’s warriors_ , can hear his own voice in reply. And he laughs, hollow and brief, because his brother definitely isn’t the Hallmark card version.

It’s dead quiet as he slides along the wall to the doorway, and he leans his head forward, peeks barely, so that only the front millimeter of his eyeballs even extends past the doorjamb. He can see his brother, flat out and unmoving on the floor, about fifteen feet into the room.

He pulls his head back, sucks in a deep breath, steps out and to the right, whirling as he does, pointing forward, left, right, covering the cavernous hanger. He’s alert for ambushes, eyes darting everywhere, and he steps in, and he’s constantly twisting, turning, pointing, in all directions, doesn’t let his guard down even when he sees the blood, skirts around the ring of ashes that circumnavigates Dean’s splayed out body. He heads around back of the piled up boxes, and there’s no one. It’s deserted, except for his brother.

He strides back over to Dean, eyes on the doorway, gun pointed and ready, drops to his knees and puts the tips of his fingers to his brother’s neck. Pulse faint, thready, and Sam releases a breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding and his head is dizzy for a second. He studies Dean’s face, sheened with perspiration, ashen, blotched with smears of blood that shine wetly around his lips, and touches his hand to the metal bolt, about two inches of it sticking out of his brother’s shoulder. A shy, barely visible column of smoke is wreathing up around it, and he can smell sulfur in the wispy haze.

“Dean,” he mutters, and he lightly slaps his brother’s cheek. “Dean… come on, man. This can’t happen to you now. Mojo up, huh?”

His eyes flit away from Dean’s face then, because he’s kneeling in blood, and it’s a ghastly reminder of New Harmony. He stares at it, wonders if his vision is playing tricks on him, because he’s sure he can see the hazy outline of dollops, lumps of something, scattered at random intervals, but when he blinks hard they aren’t there. And then he tilts his head, freezes for a full minute, his fascination overcoming his worry. And he pushes up to his feet again, needs to get some distance, some perspective, and it’s like he’s hypnotized by it, a vision he knows isn’t real because he was just kneeling right there, had his hand flat on the floor  _right there_  and he knows he felt solid, cold concrete under his palm.

He takes a few steps back, gazes at them, spread out, blood streaked but not real, a bronzed gossamer outline sweeping out on either side of his brother’s shoulders, ten feet on each side of him, flickering in and out of phase like a mirage in the desert, the twin to the smoky, blackened outline of wings he glimpsed in the split second between Dean destroying Zachariah and hauling him out of the room in Van Nuys. And even in his awe it makes Sam’s blood run cold, this final proof, as if he really doubted any more, that maybe this Dean is nothing more than a veneer, the outer shell of something ancient, and brutal, and deadly: Michael, who will burn it all down if he has to. And the knowledge leaves Sam feeling hollow and numb with the tantalizing thought that he himself might save the planet if he turns and walks away, leaves Michael to the tender mercies of whatever demon or Horseman happens to wander by.

“Makes you wish you had a camera handy, doesn’t it?”

The spell is shattered, and Sam spins, sweeps his gun around.

Crowley is pocketing his cellphone, one hand raised defensively. “Bobby called, wanting a progress report.” He gestures at Dean’s sprawled out body. “The Weekly World News would pay a small fortune for a snapshot of that,” he says regretfully. Then he smiles. “Looks like they slipped him a  _mickey_ ,” he mocks. “That crossbow bolt must’ve been dipped in something fairly potent to take him down like that.”

Sam lets the gun drop, raises a heavy hand to his head, palms his face for a second while he calms himself. “How long for the boilers to go once Bobby plugs the valves?” he says wearily. “And is it clear out there still?”

Crowley nods. “It’s clear, but we’re pushing it… these guys don’t clock off just because it’s Saturday. I told him to go ahead, we’ll have time.” He motions past Sam with his eyes. “Looks like you might kill two birds, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Sam glances back round again, only now sees the legend stamped on the boxes. “Croatoan,” he breathes. He flits his eyes from the nearest palate to all the others in turn. “Do you think that’s all of it?”

The demon shrugs dismissively. “Anyone’s guess. But it’s something to be going on with.” He reaches into his inside coat pocket, pulls out a small, round object, holds it up to the light and smiles.

“Is that a hand grenade?” Sam gapes.

“I always carry one,” Crowley replies smoothly. “You never know when it’ll come in handy.”

There’s a noise, a labored groan, his name. “S…m…” And Dean cracks open his lids, and his eyes are stark with pain and suffering, and it’s so familiar, because it’s Dean’s eyes, not Michael’s, and they aren’t ancient, and brutal, and deadly.

And Sam drops to his knees again, slides a hand under his brother’s head. “Dean,” he says urgently. “You there? Dude?” His words tumble out, strained and nervous. “I’m right here, I got you. I’m getting you out, I’m – I’m just not sure how… the wings, I don’t know if I can—”

“They’re not really there,” Crowley cuts in. He walks around them, taps his foot where the shapes glisten, and his shoe goes right through them. “They’re an illusion… Pestilence must’ve worked some spell to make them manifest, but they can’t  _be_  on this plane of existence.” He sniggers suddenly. “Like my horns and tail. It’s like – a shadow of them. A representation. Or something like that. You can lift him, your hand will just pass right through.”

Sam bites his lip, puts out his fingers, touches the shapes where they waft and shimmer, feels an odd tingling in his hand, creeping higher, like static, and the hairs on his arm stand up, entranced. He slides his hand further, under, feels normal so far, until his brother stifles a cry and stares wildly at him.

“Of course, he’ll still feel it if Pesky used his evil powers to damage them in any way,” Crowley remarks offhandedly. He’s walking towards the boxes now, gazing up at the piles. “Some accelerant would be good,” he declares. “Then we could really get this party started.”

Sam looks down into his brother’s wide, hurt gaze, and he feels his own fear gnaw at his insides. “How did he hurt you?” he says, and he flicks a glance at Crowley. “In the bag. Kerosene.”

The demon nods, walks briskly out of the room, and Sam turns his attention back to his brother. “Dean, how did he hurt you?” he repeats, his voice dry and scratchy with anxiety. “Is there something on the bolt? Did he say what it was?”

Dean’s eyes are glazing over, drifting closed, and Sam shakes him gently, sweeps his eyes around the room again. “Did you take him out?” he says. “Dean. Pestilence, did you take him out, did you get his ring?”

Dean smiles at him, and his teeth are stained red too. He flops his hand up, fingers clenched tight around something.

Sam turns at the sound of footfalls behind him again, Crowley, can in hand.

“Sammy…” Dean is murmuring it out, pulling at his shirt, tapping at it with whatever he’s holding, and Sam catches hold of his hand, extricates the prize, blanches when he sees what it is.

“I believe he’s giving you the finger,” Crowley offers from above, and he walks on past, right through the wings that still flutter feebly in and out of phase, and Dean doesn’t react, doesn’t wince until after Sam stuffs the chunk of meat into his hip pocket and maneuvers his hand under his brother’s shoulders again, and then he lets out a strangled moan and his eyes roll back in his head.

Nothing for it, Sam thinks. He slips the street sweeper off his back, parks it on the floor next to the shotgun, and then he hauls Dean up, bends, hoists him up across his shoulder, and if he’s expecting to feel something, some kind of dragging heaviness from the wings, it isn’t there.

“He’s bleeding pretty badly at the back there,” Crowley remarks, as he sloshes the accelerant around the palates, and the rank smell rises up to met Sam’s nostrils in place of the holy oil. “You know… whatever Pestilence shot him up with should wear off,” the demon adds, and it’s almost sympathetic, reassuring, almost like he’s making an effort.

Sam glances down at the guns, looks over at Crowley again. “Can you get those? And the duffel?”

Crowley smiles, and Sam fancies it might even reach his eyes. “I can get them.”

Sam starts walking, lurching, staggering under the burden because Dean’s solid, packed muscle and no lightweight, and he’s leaning forward, letting his brother’s weight be the momentum he needs. As he reaches the desk he turns to see Crowley walking up behind him, brisk and businesslike, toting the bag, the street sweeper in his other hand.

“I could get used to this,” the demon quips down at the big gun. “I feel all lock, stock and two smoking barrels about it, actually.” He motions over at the desk. “I’d duck if I were you.”

Sam blinks for a second, shuffles in there and collapses to the floor, eases his brother’s limp body down and shields it with his own while Crowley hunkers in behind him.

“When is it going to—”

The blast rocks the hallway, resounds for long seconds, and Sam can smell smoke, feel it ease its way into his nostrils.

“Right about then, I should think,” Crowley says redundantly. “They’ll be coming out of the woodwork now. We should leave before the fun really starts.”

Sam hauls his brother out from under the desk, hefts him up again, and his eyes fall on the monitors and he stops, stands dead still, stares hard, and he’s speechless, feels a numb shock that turns his legs to lead.

Crowley is already halfway across the lobby. “Sam,” he hollers back. “When I said we had time, I didn’t mean we had time to watch the telly. Come on.”

Sam turns, teeters up to the demon. “Call Bobby,” he huffs out. “Tell him to abort. Do it now.” And he keeps going, breaks into a clumsy trot that almost has him crashing down face first, but he forces himself on even though he can feel his brother’s head flopping limply against his back, feel slick blood on his hands where he’s hanging on to Dean.

Crowley is passing him by, pulling at the door. “What the fuck are you on about?” he’s sputtering, outraged. “He’s probably waiting in the car by now. It’s too late for him to go back down there, he’ll go up with the joint…”

And Sam crashes past him, through the open door and out into the night, feels the air cold and bracing on his face, and he keeps running, almost losing his legs, out across the parking lot, breath heaving in and out, and Castiel is there, hovering by the car, as huge-eyed with anxiety as Dean was when he came round and stared up at Sam.

“Door, get the door, Cas,” Sam pants out, because he can feel himself flagging, and Castiel sidesteps adroitly, pulls the back door open. Sam bends, flops his brother half on and half off the seat, and Castiel is crabbing nimbly in on the other side then, pulling Dean up the rest of the way and cradling him in his arms as he stares down, and his voice is cracking with panic.

“What happened to him? What did they do, Sam, why is he—”

Sam is already pulling his head out, backing away. “I don’t know… watch his shoulder, there’s a crossbow bolt in it. Crowley thinks there might be something on it, poison, some sort of infection maybe.” He stops for a second, bends over double, can feel himself starting to gag as he glances sideways at Crowley, who’s holding his cellphone and still looks mystified. “Did you get Bobby?” he asks thickly.

“No, I did not,” the demon snaps. “He didn’t pick up. And what the hell is—”

Castiel cuts in, calling out from the car, high-pitched and desperate now. “Blood, Sam… there’s blood here, everywhere…”

Sam gulps back bile as he straightens up, and it sears his throat. “They did something to his back, Cas,” he chokes out, past the burn. “Damaged him – the wings maybe. They were there, I could see them… like Pestilence summoned them or something.” And now he’s turning to start his trip back. “Cas, call Bobby. Tell him to unplug the valves if he can – Adam is in there.”

He bends, lifts the street sweeper up from where Crowley laid it across the duffel, starts running, and he can hear shouting behind him, thinks he might even catch sight of Bobby in his peripheral vision, haring out of the darkness over to his left.

And then Sam is through the doors again, hugging the walls, sneaking back to the desk, staring at the screens, and he exhales a shuddering breath. Adam, pacing in and out of shot, gesturing, talking at someone offscreen, and he looks agitated, mad as hell in fact. And Sam hears Dean’s voice in his head,  _we got Adam sucked into this mess_ , sees the guilt shadowing Dean’s eyes as he said it, and this might be his chance to set that right, lift that weight from his brother’s shoulders.“We need to get him out of it,” he murmurs. “Room, which room…”

He breathes in smoke, stifles a cough, covers his mouth. And he lopes purposefully back up the hallway.

***

And really, is it any surprise it hasn’t gone their way, Bobby thinks as he leans in, shines his flashlight down on Dean’s shoulder. “Dammit,” he mutters. “We’ll have to dig that out.” And then he shakes his head as he looks up at Castiel and barks out questions rapid-fire. “Adam? Are you sure? Was _Sam_  sure? How can that be? Why would they have him here?”

“That’s what he said,” the younger man replies. “Pestilence must have picked him up in Van Nuys… Zachariah’s destruction will have been a homing beacon for anything demonic or supernatural for hundreds of miles. Maybe he showed up there looking for Michael.” Castiel’s eyes flick over towards the building. “They baited my brother before with Adam…” he murmurs. “Maybe they intend doing so again.” He looks back. “How much time is there before it blows?”

Bobby shields his face with his hands, and his voice is muffled. “Jesus,” he sighs. “I don’t know.”

Castiel leans forward, urgent. “Bobby, if it blows with Sam in there, if he gets hurt… his ribs, if they’re broken, if any part of the  _sigil_  is broken – he won’t be hidden from Lucifer any more.”

Bobby sets his jaw, roots in his pockets. “Here. Car keys.” He locks eyes with Castiel for a minute. “I’m gonna head back to the furnace room. If it goes up, don’t hang around, get him away from here. We’ll make our own way home.” He pauses then, bites his lip. “If Lucifer got in Sam… he’d know everything Sam knows, is that right?”

Castiel nods wordlessly.

Bobby lowers his voice. “Okay. In that case… at my place, there’s a hidey hole in the mantel in the den, Dean knows where. There’s a lockbox… IDs, medical insurance, bank account details, money. In case you need to hit the road.” He makes his tone meaningful. “In case it isn’t safe for you there any more.”

He can see Castiel is reading him loud and clear, and the younger man reaches out, grabs his sleeve, and his face is strained. “Bobby,” he says thinly. “I don’t know how to—”

“Just clear out,” Bobby snaps back harshly. “No fancy goodbyes, we’ll catch you up.”

“Drive…” Castiel trails off lamely, and he shrugs. “I don’t know how to drive.”

Bobby rolls his eyes, manages a weak smile. “Come on… there must be something of Novak in there…” He snorts at Castiel’s headshake. “Idjit. It ain’t rocket science. Just crank the ignition, switch on the headlights, point it that way and go west, young man. It’ll come back to you.” He reaches out to tip Dean’s chin up for a second, stares down at his lax features, slides his thumb across his cheek. He flicks his eyes up to Castiel again, and the other man is gazing back, as knowing as he always is.

“Take care of him,” Bobby says gruffly.

Castiel nods simply. “You know I will.”

Bobby straightens up, walks past Crowley, who’s pacing irritably and scribbling his frustration in the air with his hand.

“Berk,” the demon snarls. “Fucking  _muppet_.” He whirls, wags a finger. “I’d start driving right now if I were you,” he snaps. “Because this has officially gone tits-up, and—”

Bobby ignores him, starts jogging back into the darkness, and he can hear Crowley yelling after him, can hear the thud of shoes hitting tarmac as the demon catches him up, and he sprints around in front and forces Bobby to a halt.

“Are you mad?” Crowley spits hotly. He gestures back at the Impala. “I heard what he said… about the ribs, the sigil. If Satan stops by to collect after that place goes up and you’re in there too, he’ll dig you out of the rubble and use you as a bargaining chip—”

“Get out of my way,” Bobby growls. “Find another rock to hide under.”

“Oh, do me a favor,” the demon snaps back. “How fast do you think the moose will cave if Lucifer starts slicing and dicing you in front of him? Because I’d give it two minutes tops before he spreads them and puckers up. And then the devil has his one true vessel, while our guy is bleeding out on the back seat of his car. I’m not liking those odds, Bobby.”

Bobby leans in, scathing now. “I said, get out of my way.” And then there’s a tap on his shoulder and he swivels around, finds Castiel standing behind him. “What?” he snaps.

“Crowley’s right,” the younger man races out, agitated. “Forget what I said before. You can’t go back in there.”

Bobby feels his ire ramp up, takes a step forward. “You listen to me, boy,” he says, and he pitches it low and dangerous. “If Sam gets hurt in there, he could pop up on the devil’s radar. Those were your words. And I’m damned if I’m letting—”

And now Castiel takes a step forward, right into Bobby’s personal space, and his tone isn’t panicked any more, it’s steady, icy cold and burning hot all at once. “No, you listen to _me_ ,” he bites out. “You know too much. I heard Michael talking to you…” He cocks his head, slants his eyes meaningfully beyond Bobby, to the demon and back again, and he lowers his voice to match Bobby’s. “I’m not going into the details in present company, Bobby, but you know too much. Do you understand me? I know what I said about Sam, but Crowley is right… if Lucifer shows up and starts working on you to turn Sam, well…” He shakes his head, raises an eyebrow, sardonic now. “Let’s just say plan B will be off the table. Because I’d give it two minutes tops before you spread them and pucker up.”

Bobby doubletakes and then stares it out with the other man for a minute before he pulls back his fist and lets fly, feels it slam into Castiel’s jaw, and sees him stagger before he collapses onto his butt on the ground, rubbing at his cheek.

Crowley sniggers from behind him. “Well, if it’s a fight…”

And that’s the last thing Bobby hears for a while.

***

The smoke from the warehouse is hazier on the other side of the building and it’s easier to breathe. And the final door in the hallway is the only one that’s closed, but it has a glass panel in it. Sam sneaks a peek, and there he is, his half-brother, skinny, hair tufted wildly like Dean’s the morning after one dozen too many, eyes almost but not quite Dean’s eyes. He has one hand thrust in his pocket, and the other stabbing at the air as he talks, his face twisted into the same disgruntled expression Sam remembers him wearing at Bobby’s when it turned out he knew full well who they were.

Sam sags against the wall for a second, grounds himself with a few deep breaths, smiles. “We got them both back, Dean,” he breathes. “Okay. Three. Two. One.” He steps out in front of the door, aims his foot dead center and it flies open, and Adam goggles at him for a split second before his face lights up.

“Sam… I don’t believe it. You came, I don’t believe it…”

No time for pleasantries, he’s in through the door, and she steps out in front of him, her navy blue eyes darkening to black.

“Hey, Sam,” she trills insolently and she’s already raising her hand, but he gets in first, punches the power out of him, pins her to the wall, and she bares her teeth at him in a snarl.

“Meg, just once,” he says acidly, “will you shut the fuck up?”

Adam points at her, his lip curled up in distaste, and he babbles out a stream of words. “They’ve had me here for days, her and that bald creepy guy. What the hell is going on? And are you okay?” He cranes his head past Sam, out into the hallway. “Where’s Dean, is he with you? Is he okay? I thought I heard him say yes, Sam, is he okay?”

Sam motions his head backwards, lies as smoothly as he ever did to Dean because he needs his brother focused and moving. “He’s fine, Adam, he’s waiting for us. But we have to get out of here now, because—”

And then Sam feels the ground start to vibrate under his feet, hears a dull, far-off roar begin and start to get louder. He sees something flicker in his brother’s eyes, sees them widen, sees him start to form words, raise his hand to point behind him, sees Meg tip her head back and start to laugh in the fraction of a second before something solid impacts with the back of his head.

And then he doesn’t see anything.

 *******

He comes round at a weird but familiar angle, flopped over to the side with his head pillowed up against his brother’s thigh, and he can see a blood-spotted rag wrapped around Sam’s leg and hear Bobby snoring in the back.

He lets the motion of the car lull him in his half-awake state. And it might even rock him back to sleep if it weren’t for the other familiar sensation of pain, throbbing across his shoulders and back. There are little pain slaves in there, chained to the galleys in his own personal Roman warship of pain, rowing as hard as they can,  _battle speed_  as he lays there still, and he raises his arm up,  _attack speed_ , and he hears himself squeak out his agony as he flails his arm up feebly and slaps it down on Sam’s knee,  _fuckin’ ramming speed_ , and he knows he cries out with it. His memory is cloudy,  _Pestilence_ , fuzzy,  _hurt me, sonofabitch_ , and he whispers out in almost-wonder. “Nuh fair. Nuh spse hpn…”

He feels a hand touch lightly on his back, pat him and start rubbing circles, just barely, because it feels stiff and padded up there, feels damp too, a tacky dampness, and he can smell his own blood. And there’s an odd second when he knows in his gut that it isn’t Sam, isn’t that brother, despite the denim under his cheek, and he thinks ludicrously that it means he must be a real princess after all, if he can feel the difference in that touch even through all that bulk, and what was it, twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds and—

“I’m not a pea.”

And sure enough, he’s raving Hans Christian Andersen  _out fuckin’ loud_  in his delirium, and he stops, scrunches up his face for a minute because it’s so incongruous to hear  _that_ voice when he’s staring straight at his baby’s cassette deck, and he knows damn well he isn’t driving.

“Whre… we?” he mutters out laboriously, because he feels so damn listless and slack inside it’s like he’s wading through waist-deep mud while comatose. “Din’t know y’ cd drv.”

“We’re headed west,” Castiel replies. “I think so, anyway… Crowley said it was west. And I can’t. Drive, I mean. I’m just pointing and going, like Bobby told me to.”

“Fkn’ hep me up,” Dean croaks in horror. “M’ car.”

“You need to rest,” Castiel says firmly. “You’re bleeding, and I can’t stop it. Just be still, please, until we reach Bobby’s.”

And it’s  _so fuckin’ tempting_  to do just that, Dean thinks, because the circles Castiel is still gently tracing on his back with his hand are hypnotic, and the judder of the car on the road surface is soporific, so much so that even with the dull thrum of pain he feels languid, indolent, feels as if he might possibly sleep, even though tiredness is something he never thought he’d experience again and he really wants to tear Cas a new one for steering with one hand on the wheel when he  _can’t fuckin’ drive_.

“The car will be fine after some minor repairs,” Castiel continues absently.

Dean lurches upright in the seat then, puts enough effort into it so he knows he’ll come to rest against the window, and he yelps at the burn as it ignites and flashes through his whole body. He fists his hands so his thumbnails dig right into his palms, stares out through stinging tears and sweat pouring down his brow and into his eyes, flops forward slightly so his cheek is sliding against the glass of the window and he’s leaning his upper arm on the shotgun door, and some of the pressure is off his back. He’s panting out the pain in puffs, like he’s waiting for the head to crown, looking dead ahead, into the darkness, fixing his eyes on the ribbon of road as his baby eats it up, and he spots something in the distance, speeding closer. “S’red light,” he mutters.

“I’m aware.”

“Cas. S’red light.”

“Michael, you need to rest,” Castiel says sternly. “Save your stre—”

“S’red fkn light, Cas… trn, rlrd, brks,  _brks_ , Jeez Crst.  _Fk_. Fkn’. Pl ovr.  _NOW_.”

They rumble over the train tracks just as the alarm bell starts to clang, and the train streaks through the railroad crossing behind them as the car brakes to a sedate halt on the deserted, treelined blacktop. Castiel glances quizzically over at Dean, and now Dean is actually looking properly he can see the other man’s face is taut with worry and his eyes are shadowed with his own exhaustion and something that might be sadness, and there’s a purplish-black bruise blossoming on his jaw.

Dean swallows, puts the effort into speaking proper words instead of pain-truncated verbal morse code. “Red light,” he manages, between breaths. “Means stop. And what happened to your face?”

Castiel leans into his hand for a second, kneads his temple before he moves his fingers to his jaw and gingerly tests it out. “Crowley told me red lights mean go faster,” he says wearily. “And Bobby hit me.”

Dean can’t help a snort of forced laughter, and it sends a bolt of pain shooting from his back up his neck. “Fuck,” he whispers, and he screws his eyes closed because there are tears of misery leaking out of them. “Did the old bastard hit you while he was teaching you to drive?” he scratches out. “And red lights do mean go faster when you’re right on top of them. Not from fifty yards out though, huh, Cas? Especially at railroad crossings when there’s a fuckin’ express train coming.”

Castiel stares back at him. “That would explain all the honking noises and near misses,” he offers reflectively, and he bites his lip. “Another car… scraped us as we journeyed. Very slightly.” He sees Dean’s look, continues hurriedly. “But it’s Crowley’s fault, don’t you think? Since he told me red lights mean go faster.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “You really are just him aren’t you? Cas. All Cas. No Jimmy.”

“No Jimmy,” Castiel agrees dolefully. “Though I feel like I might be more use as Jimmy. At least then I could drive safely.”

Dean presses his face into the glass, and it’s blessedly cool against his skin. “Jimmy was a good guy, Cas, and he had guts, but he was a fuckin’ ad salesman,” he murmurs. “He just wanted to go home, be with his family. He’d have run a mile from this mess. I love you just the way you are. Don’t go changing. Promise me.” And   _fuck_ , what is it Sam always says? He imagines his brother’s face, screwed up with part amusement, part frustration.  _You ramble when you’re feverish, Dean_. “Forget it,” he amends. “I ramble when I’m feverish.” Pain electrifies his nerve endings again, and he winces. “My back is killing me. Shoulder too. What did that sonofabitch do to me? And what did  _you_  do to me? I feel like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

Castiel sighs heavily. “Crossbow bolt, in your shoulder still. Sam said it might be poisoned. And you’re bleeding… your back. It’s shredded. Were you flogged?”

Dean frowns, spends a confused, painful moment backtracking. “There was definitely cutting. Some snipping. Gouging. Harsh language. That was me.” He thinks on it another minute. “There may have been some flogging,” he confirms. “Seems that’s how the typical Hell denizen rolls.”

Castiel flinches minutely, and his voice rises an octave or two. “There wasn’t enough time to stitch the wounds or remove the bolt, we had to get moving. But you were bleeding…” He speeds up, jittery. “I pulled over on the roadside and packed it all with some clothing from Bobby’s bag.”

“Not his Glenfiddich whiskey sweatshirt, I hope. He’ll be pissed.” Dean flicks through his mental notebook again, finds a page that’s turned down at the corner and squints to read the scrawl in his head. “Yeah, the bolt is poisoned.” He grimaces. “I’ll live. I hope.” He gestures feebly at Castiel’s thigh. “What happened to your leg?”

The other man frowns. “You bit me. While I was doing all that.”

“Through the denim?”

“Through the denim.”

“Lucky for you it wasn’t higher up.”

Castiel narrows his eyes. “Yes. Lucky for me.”

Dean smirks, turns it into a groan as the pain hits again, the beat-beat-beat of the tom-tom sounding out the percussion of agony on his upper back, the tick-tick-tock of its throb, the drip-drip-drip of the burn in his shoulder. “He could see me, Castiel,” he says. “See  _them_ … I could feel his hands on them. He did something to them. Cut into me. Broke them, I think.” And he finds he’s shuddering, feels a tidal wave of nausea that swirls higher and higher up his body and then takes everything with it as it recedes, his organs, bones, muscles carried along on the surf like flotsam, his veins and arteries clumping like seaweed, so all that’s left is the outer shell formed by his skin. “Feel sick,” he whispers. “Didn’t think I could any more.”

And Castiel’s voice is suddenly faint, stop-start, staccato and panicked. “What can I do? I can’t see them now I’m not me any more. Michael – what he did. I can’t see…”

Dean flicks his eyes over, thinks Castiel might even be shaking with nerves, thinks the other man looks like he’s about to lose it.

“I don’t even know where we are,” he’s continuing, and he’s scrubbing his hand through his hair so it stands up every which way. “I don’t know how far away we are from Bobby’s. I’ve tried to summon Gabriel, and it isn’t working—” 

“Castiel,” Dean cuts in, as steadily as he can even though he knows his own voice is weak. “It’ll be okay. You need to calm down, not up. You look tired and you’re pretty beat up yourself. You need to rest too.”

Castiel shakes his head. “No, we need to get to Bobby’s,” he insists. “Gabriel can’t see us here because of the sigils. But he’ll go back there when he recovers, and he’s the only one who might—”

Dean curls his lip up, sardonic. “You could always shoot yourself in the ribs, break one of them. Then call him.” He sees the other man’s expression brighten, and he qualifies it grouchily. “It was a  _joke_. Fuckin’ idiot. You do that, I’ll break the rest of them one at a time.” He closes his eyes. “Pull off the road, into the trees,” he says faintly. “Just for a while. We’ll all rest better.” And then out of the blue something occurs to him. “Why are you driving anyway? And what has Crowley got to do with any of this?”

And Castiel is silent, the sort of silence that speaks volumes, and when Dean cracks his eyes open again the other man is staring back with unnerving intensity even for him.

“Cas? Why are you driving?” Dean asks again, and it isn’t exactly worry that’s flaring up inside him, it’s more like foreboding, a sense of inevitability about what he’s going to hear.

Castiel’s tone is guarded. “I’m driving because Bobby is… _sleeping_. On the back seat.”

Dean swallows, and he can’t turn around to look, and he tells himself it’s because his back hurts too much, that it isn’t anything to do with that feeling, that apprehension prickling his senses, that it isn’t anything to do with him not wanting to turn around to look because he’s afraid of what he’ll see. “And Sam,” he says slowly. “He was there, I spoke to him. He’s in the back too, right? He’s sleeping too, right?”

There’s another long, heavy silence.

“ _Right_?”

And Castiel starts speaking, doesn’t break his stare, relates the information with his usual care and attention to detail, every point in the exercise covered precisely, every conversation related verbatim. And Dean concentrates numbly, distantly, calmly, as Castiel tells him honestly, and conscientiously, and diligently, and objectively, leaves nothing out, explains the reasoning behind every single decision, explains the logical progression of events and how and why they led to certain actions, how it all brought them to this moment of thinking Sam is gone.

Then there’s just more silence, and Dean swallows it down thickly until he finds the words and spits them out bitterly. “Why did you even let him – why? To  _Detroit_? You knew, Cas, I told you Detroit was where it happened…” He finds he has his hand up and splayed against his chest, supporting himself, and he can feel his heart doing ninety along the rumble strip, and a sudden wave of distrust and skepticism overflows. “Were you following the plan, Cas?” he whispers. “Was that it? Did you let him come here so—”

“No!” It’s vehement, horrified, and Castiel doesn’t blink or look away, and his eyes are stricken. “No. Never that.” His voice softens to gentle. “You’re his brother… he wanted to find you. I tried to put him off but he didn’t want you going up against Pestilence alone. And I’m sorry.”

 _My brother is gone_ , Dean thinks.  _This is it. This is Detroit_. And he doesn’t know if maybe he is slipping, like Pestilence said, but it’s like some part of him has cracked, the flagstones he laid over his emotions, the barricade he built between who he was and who he is. And sorrow and terror are seeping up through the cracks like some colorless gas that was trapped in his foundations, like methane, like radon, like fire damp, and he chokes out incoherent despair. He tries to raise his hands up to his eyes to hide from his loss and keep his grief private, but it hurts so much they fall to his sides, and his fingers twitch helplessly. Yet even through the blur of tears, he’s aware that Castiel is watchful and alert, that he’s waiting, that he isn’t missing a damn thing although his face is composed and impassive, that he’s tense, coiled with a sort of desperation even if he’s absolutely still, and that his eyes are penetrating even while they ache compassion.

“But Sam, he’s…” Dean husks it out, dry as a bone. “A keeper. He’s a  _keeper_ , Cas… Cas.”

And he reaches, and Castiel moves forward at exactly the right moment.  _Always could read me like a fuckin’ book_ , Dean thinks distraughtly, and he falls in to meet him. He’s gathered up and held close and tight, while he hyperventilates, and weeps his despair out snottily into Castiel’s neck. And Castiel rocks him, and croons meaningless words of solace into his hair, and smoothes away his tears with cool fingertips, presses tender lips to his face and tells him it’ll be alright,  _it’ll be alright, Dean, it’ll be alright_ , and the words blur into a nonsense mish-mash of hesitant, clumsy, awkward comfort and  _DeanDeanDean_ ,  _alrightalrightalright_.

***

Jess liked his teeth,  _they’re so white, Sam_ , liked his smile. She liked them for a while, and then she loved them. So Sam took good care of them, and not a night went by when he didn’t floss, brush, brush some more with the turbo-powered Sonicaid, tongue-scrape even, before sloshing it all out with one-hundred proof mouthwash that scorched his gums like barely diluted battery acid, and he gargled it too, because he remembered reading somewhere that the germs that cause bad breath sometimes colonize the roof of the mouth. And then after he finished, he’d practice the smile that was about to get him laid six ways to Sunday and say a prayer of thanks for whatever genetic quirk of fate, or maybe spell his dad or Bobby dug up to avoid dental costs, blessed him with those teeth. Because even if he wasn’t as beautiful as his brother, he knew his girl would look right through Dean to see Sam smile. And that night when his brother showed up out of the past, she did just that.

Sam thinks all of that in the time between spitting out his front teeth and  _oofing_  out at the explosion of pain as the boot sinks itself in his gut again, hitching him up a foot off the floor, so that even his hands and knees hover in mid air for a split second, like a cartoon scalded cat. He’s breathing in snuffling snorts because his nose is pulp, and even though his vision is spotting he can see two long gloopy strands of bloody snot swinging wildly from his nostrils, and it makes him think of Brady and how he must resemble his college friend by now.

Should’ve buzzed the hair, Dean, he thinks dully, because his brother left enough of it there to make a good fistful, and even though his brain is silly putty he has a clear image of his dad barking at him to get it good and short like Dean’s so it wouldn’t trip him up in a dirty fight. And this is a  _fucking_ dirty fight, and the soulless black-eyed bastard who’s laying into him is using his hair to haul him around the room like he’s Wilma Flintstone, and he’d fight back if his hands hadn’t been stamped into puffy Mickey Mouse fingers he can barely move, let alone flex to make fists.

The really stupid thing is that the guy is a good foot shorter than him, but Sam knows that molten eruption of power and what it can achieve, and short stuff is spewing it out at him now, spinning him so fast it’s almost thrilling, it’s on the cusp of being exciting, of being a joyride, of being something he might even wait in line for and then race around to the fastpass dispenser so he can go back for more later, Sammy being swung around like the guy is one of those brick shithouse hammer-throwers going for a record fourth gold medal here at the Beijing Olympic Games.

And Sam has a fleeting moment of clarity as he spins, a memory from the month before his brother came back, Ruby riding him in some no-tell motel while he sucked on a Bud and watched some guy who was as wide as he was tall send the metal ball flying like it was weightless. And Dean had always hunkered down in front of the Games when he got the chance, chin on his hands and eyes glued to the screen, but Sam never thought of Dean, not once, even though he craned his neck, desperate to see past Ruby’s pitching, heaving body. He never thought of Dean even though the Games didn’t interest him one iota, because he had taken that precious memory of his brother and drowned it at birth, smothered it out of existence, battered it into submission, blindfolded it so it couldn’t blame him with its eyes, and taped its mouth up so it couldn’t hurl accusations. He never thought of Dean so he wouldn’t ever have to imagine how Dean might look at him and what he might say if he knew what Sam was doing. But all the time he never thought of Dean, he damn well thought of Dean.

He jolts back to awareness, to the now, as the demon hauls him up onto his knees and he reels drunkenly there until the demon’s hands impact on the sides of his face so his ears explode inside with a bass boom that resounds and echoes, and  _fuck_ , roll of thunder hear my cry, he thinks, and he knows his ear drums are packing up and leaving town to set up home somewhere quieter with less crime. There’s a beautiful moment of relative peace then, because Winchester peace is always relative, and the boom eases off, but it’s still the intro to Tusk inside his head and when he crashes up against the wall it flares impressively into the Trojan Marching Band, live at Dodger Stadium.

When the demon is nose to nose with him he realizes he’s having trouble focusing, there are floaters meandering gracefully across his field of vision and he has to peer around them, squint too, because it’s all gray, like he’s trying to see through fog. Detached retina for sure, he thinks abstractly, and he knows he might never see properly again.

“Say yes,” the meatsuit hisses at him. “He can make the pain go away.”

And Sam wants the pain to go away, and the word is on the tip of his tongue, and Dean held on for thirty years and Sam knows he won’t, so why not just end it now? But right then, as he’s starting to form the sound with his tongue, his vision clears to crystal sharp, and he sees his brother, smiling, smirking, laughing, trusting, doubting, suspicious, he sees him healthy, happy, hurt, and most of all he sees Dean _there_ , side by side with him, watching his back. Dean, who might still believe in him if Castiel wasn’t lying.

“No,” he lisps out thickly, past his swollen, bitten tongue and split lip, insolent and petulant. “Not gonna. I’ve had worse drunk-sparring with my brother.”

The demon curls back its lips. “Then we go again,” it sneers.

Sam sees his brother when the demon stamps down on his ankle, sees him when it kneecaps him. And when it raises the gun at point blank range and gives him a third eye dead center of his forehead, he sees his brother then too.

***

The next time Dean comes round he’s in the back of the Impala, and quiet but heated voices are arguing over him. He feels numb and wrung out inside, and he stares blankly at the arm pinning him down, vaguely recognizes that it’s clad in his brother’s hoodie. It’s a jarring, sparking reminder that Sam isn’t there, but he gulps his despair back down.  _Bigger fish to fry_. 

“You should have let me go back,” he hears Bobby seethe.

“You might have been killed,” Castiel replies snippishly. “What good would that serve?”

“I had time.”

“No, Bobby, you didn’t. And I sincerely doubt that Crowley would have helped me dig you out of there.”

Dean forces his eyes open, finds he’s staring into Castiel’s upside-down face, and the other man manages a faint, false smile that doesn’t even try to ascend all the way to his eyes. “It’s alright, Dean,” he lies gently.

“So you keep saying,” Dean gruffs back testily. “Only it isn’t.”

Castiel has him pillowed on his folded leg, one arm hooked around him, hand trapping his head and holding it against his belly, so Bobby can go in for the crossbow bolt, and the other hand holding a flashlight.

The old man is scrunching his eyes up to focus, slicing in, and beads of sweat are running down his face, and the tip of his tongue is sticking out at the side while he concentrates. He glances up, catches Dean’s eye. “Have to loosen it,” he mutters, and he wipes his forehead on his sleeve. “I was hoping you’d stay out. It’s stuck pretty good.”

“Of course it is.” The knife blade flashes in the gleam of the light, and Dean looks away, shivers as exquisite pain shards out from the wound, and he reaches up, finds Castiel’s hand and clamps down on it, feels the other man grip back. And Dean digs his fingers in so hard he knows he’s leaving bruises, and he can hear the damp hiss as Castiel sucks in a breath.

“Not much longer,” Bobby says, scowls as he digs in deeper. “Sorry.” He swivels the knife blade slightly. “Why is it even hurting?” he mutters distractedly. “I thought you guys didn’t feel pain.”

Dean makes an involuntary growl of annoyance and discomfort, closes his eyes. “We do feel pain, believe me,” he grates out. “We just have…  _fuckingfuck…_  higher pain thresholds.” He steadies himself, locks it down tight, knits his brow to focus on breathing through it. “It’s because of the poison. Fuck. I’ve had worse. Just get on with it.  _Fuck_.” His jaw is so tense he can barely speak, and his voice comes out strangled and raw. “Are you sure it all went up back there?”

“It did, Dean,” Castiel says quietly. “Just after Crowley hit Bobby. I couldn’t risk staying, but I saw the burn in the sky from some distance away.”

Bobby sniffs as he grips the top of the bolt, and his fingers slip, and Dean winces.

“ _Fuck_.  _Goddammit_.”

“Sorry. It’s wet, can’t get a hold of it.” Bobby quirks an eyebrow. “Your language ain’t improving any since your sainthood, is it? Gauze… it’ll help me get a grip. Hang on.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he gripes irritably. “And it’s Anglo-Saxon. Think of it as speaking in tongues. And Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I’m a saint. I never thought of that.”

“Patron saint of grocers, mariners, paratroopers, law enforcement, and sickness.” Bobby shakes his head as he leans in again. “Place was probably full of chemicals,” he bitches then. “Dynamite, boilers.  _Chemicals_. Crowley shut off the sprinkler system. If I’d just gotten back in there…” He’s pulling now, twisting, working the metal bolt out.

“Law enforcement. I forgot that. It’s just  _wrong_ …” Dean groans out an indiscernible, hoarse complaint as the bolt exits the wound with a moist, sucking squelch. “ _Fuck_.” He looks up again, sees Castiel’s face go a whiter shade of pale. “Throw up on me and I will not be responsible for what happens to you, Cas,” he says breathlessly. He fixes Bobby with a hard look. “And if you’d gone in after him, you’d be dead or worse. Cas was right, Crowley too. It was too risky.”

The old man narrows his eyes skeptically. “Does that mean we aren’t even going to try to get him back?” he clips out belligerently.

Dean is brutally blunt through his pain. “What do you suggest? That we go back right now, and you and Cas dig him out with your bare hands while I lie there watching? With demons crawling all over the place, the five-O too? And maybe the devil waiting there to pick us off?”

Bobby isn’t deflected one iota. “That’s one option.” He soaks a gauze pad in antiseptic, scrubs briskly at the wound, and he’s heavy-handed, doesn’t bat an eyelid at Dean’s barely stifled yelp.

“No, it isn’t an option,” Castiel cuts in waspishly. “Not with Dean like this.”

“Cas, for crying out loud, I—”

“Shut up, Dean,” Castiel snaps. He turns a heated stare back on Bobby. “We can’t help him, Bobby, he needs Gabriel. This has to come first.  _Dean_  has to come first. I will not risk him. You need to see the bigger picture.” He puts out a hand, finger raised, as Bobby brandishes another gauze pad. “And be more careful,” he hisses. “You’re hurting him.”

“Last time I looked, that finger wasn’t magic any more,” Bobby snipes.

Dean rolls his eyes. “Jesus. Stop fuckin’ bickering,” he croaks. “Cas,  _tact_. Look it up, it’s under T. And stop using your smiting voice. Bobby, stop with the look that says you’re old so you can do whatever you want.” He steadies his breathing, feels a wave of nausea and unnatural fatigue waft over him. “Look,” he says tiredly. “I’m not picking Sam or Lucifer up. That means the sigils are intact. It could be good, it could mean Sam’s okay. Or it could mean Lucifer has him, and Death is still cloaking him. Or…” He trails off, leaves the rest of it unspoken, doesn’t have the will or energy to voice it.

“Or what?” Bobby growls.

“It could mean the sigils are intact but Sam didn’t make it,” Castiel chips in quietly. “He’ll still be hidden if that’s the case. And I don’t mean this to sound as harsh as it will, but anything that keeps Lucifer in his temporary vessel is a workable scenario for us.”

Bobby’s voice is serrated at the edges when he replies. “It may be workable for you, you cold-hearted sonofabitch, but it isn’t—”

“Sam can’t say yes if Lucifer can’t find him, Bobby,” Dean interjects. “He can’t say it if he’s dead either. And as long as he’s still hidden, Lucifer can’t track him down and bring him back.”

Bobby glowers back balefully. “Tact, Dean,” he growls. “It’s under T.”

Dean pins the old man with his eyes. “Reality check, Bobby,” he rasps out then. “Because you need one. This is the end of the world. Get with the fuckin’ program, because none of us, not  _one_ , is more important than that. Do you get it?” He waits for the full weight of his words to sink in, before he sighs out and shakes his head, rueful. “But. Workable scenario it isn’t. Sam has the ring. I gave it to him in there, thought it’d be safer with him.”

Castiel slumps dejectedly, and his mouth forms a grim line. “Naturally. Not the brightest moment in your decision-making career. So we go back?”

“We go back.”

Bobby snorts. He’s wearing his eyebrows low in a frown now, and his glare is heated. “I don’t fuckin’ believe what I’m hearing,” he says, soft and controlled even though his rage is obvious. “He’s your brother. You don’t go after him just because he has—”

“One of the rings that might mean we can save billions of souls from burning in Hell?” Dean cuts in wearily. “Save  _Sam_ from burning in Hell, maybe?” He stops, on another electric buzz of agony that has him stifle a moan, and his hand flies up again, snatches at the air before it’s caught and held tight. And it’s Bobby this time, reaching out automatically, and Dean clenches his fingers, gasps as he rides out the pain, gazes up at Bobby and the old man’s eyes drop down, left, right, before they meet his again, and he lifts his other hand to scrub at his beard.

“I feel fuckin’ awful, Bobby,” Dean murmurs. “There was some bad medicine on that bolt. And my back… something’s really wrong. Pinion, that’s what he said. Said it was like cutting off my hands or something.” He blinks hard, uses the old man’s hand to tug him closer. “But you listen to me. I’ll be going for Sam because he has the ring… don’t you think he’d want me to stay on topic, stop this fuckin’ disaster he and I both started?”

He’s spacing out, his vision is blotching and he knows he’s sounding more labored with every word. “That isn’t the only reason, though,” he whispers. “I’ll be going for Sam because he’s my brother, and I love him. If he’s okay, that’s a bonus. And God knows, it’ll be easier to put Lucifer back in his cell if he isn’t in his true vessel. But if Sam already said yes, Bobby, then I will put him down if that’s how it has to be. I won’t let Lucifer use Sam to lay this world to waste.” He holds the man’s eyes with his own. “Do you understand me?” he breathes. “I love my brother. And I won’t do that to him. So don’t get in my way.”

He lets Bobby’s hand fall, looks away, because he feels restless now, frantic, wired, his belly rolls queasily and his ears are roaring with static. The pain in his back is relentless, and he turns his face into Castiel, and the fleece hoodie the other man is wearing smells of Sam.

“Jesus,” Dean stutters into the fabric. “Detroit, Cas. It’s fuckin’ _Detroit_. You know what happens in Detroit. It could have happened already.” He feels his heart skid to an abrupt halt on the word. “Hurts,” he gasps. “It fuckin’ hurts. My back.” But he isn’t really talking about his back now, even if it is on fire.

“I know,” Castiel says softly and he starts circling his palm there across Dean’s shoulders again. “I know it hurts.”

And he knows Castiel isn’t talking about his back either, knows Castiel is well aware of what he meant because they have lost countless numbers of their brothers to this fight. And then it dawns on him that Castiel has killed their brothers for this fight too.

“Tell me how it feels,” he says raggedly. “Tell me how it feels to kill your brother when you don’t want to.”

But Castiel doesn’t reply, just rubs his back.

***

Bobby curses softly under his breath at Dean, and heaves him up and out of the back seat of the Impala like he’s hauling a sack of russets up from his cellar. Dean flails his arms pathetically and slurs out a mouthful of generic abuse, flops limply into a sitting position and gapes down as the old man squats, lifts his boots up onto the footplates.

Bobby nods in satisfaction. “Well, I had thought to crush the damn thing, but maybe it’ll come in useful after all.”

Dean scowls down at him. “Your  _wheelchair_?” he says frostily. “Are you kidding me? I’m the prince of fuckin’ light, for crying out—”

“Prince of fuckin’ darkness, more like,” Bobby barks out as he stands. “Do you kiss our Father who art in Heaven with that mouth?”

Dean grits his teeth, tries to push up himself, groans out as pain crests. “It’s a steaming bucket of fail,” he hisses out bitterly. “I can walk. Hell, I can  _fly_. I’m feeling better. It’s wearing off.” And then he slumps dejectedly, hunches forward to keep his shoulders clear of the chair back, and he’s trembling, blood boiling hot one minute, and freezing his veins solid the next. “Jesus. What did that bastard put in me? What has he done to me? This can’t happen to me now…”

He’s rambling, losing it, he knows, because the devil has Sam in his grasp and might be raising Hell with him even now, might be coming for them, and he can’t protect them. And he can see his brother, see  _Lucifer_ , in his head, and it’s Sam’s face, staring at him with that supercilious, pitying look, and he can hear him  _tsk_  out his disgust at how low Michael has fallen, consorting with the hairless apes, seeking their counsel and taking comfort in them, being led by them. He squeezes his eyes closed, leans into his hand. “Don’t go too fast,” he mutters. He remembers something then, cranes his neck around painfully. “Where is Castiel?”

“Asleep in the front seat,” Bobby says. “He’s worn out. I covered him, he’ll be okay until he comes round. Nights are warm enough now so he can—”

“No…” Dean makes his voice as firm as he can, lifts a hand, clutches at thin air until he grabs a handful of Bobby’s sleeve. “No. That’s not happening. You need to wake him, get him inside. If he sleeps, he needs to be with people. With _me_. So I can wake him if – if he needs to be woken.”

Bobby fixes him with a beady eye that reads him loud and clear, and he nods slowly, makes his way around to the shotgun seat. Dean lolls his head back, rests it at an angle on his shoulder, stares up at the sky. He feels drugged to the gills, disoriented, and he wonders if he will ever feel the clouds against his skin again.

Castiel rouses with a yelp, emerges wild-haired and bleary-eyed, smothers a yawn and skulks up alongside the wheelchair. He eyes Dean critically. “You don’t look any better,” he says, and his tone is disappointed, undercut with a sharper note of accusation. “In fact, you look sicker.”

Dean opens his mouth on a tart reply that turns into a fit of spluttering and coughing, sees Castiel’s eyes widen, and then Bobby is thrusting a handful of paper towels under his mouth and they blossom red as he spits up. “Ugh.”

“Gabriel,” Bobby says pointedly. “Will he come? After what you did to him?”

He runs his tongue along his teeth, shudders, hoiks up some more bloody saliva. “He’ll come,” he husks out messily. “He’s probably already here. Hiding.”

The old man starts pushing him towards the house, jangles the doorkeys out of his pocket as they grind over rough ground that sends pain jarring through Dean’s back until he’s gasping with it. He feels weak, weary, can feel his eyelids sagging, feel his jaw go slack, feel himself slipping into a state of torpor that makes him wonder if he’s going into hibernation.

“We can only wait so long for Gabriel,” Castiel says suddenly, from beside him, and when he continues, it’s low and apologetic. “If this really is Detroit, then we need to assume the worst. If Lucifer has Sam, he’ll know you’re damaged. He’ll come for you, and you won’t have much of a chance in this condition.”

Bobby is putting his back into pushing the wheelchair up the ramp, pants out the effort when they come to a stop outside the door. “What is it with Detroit?” he snaps out irritably. “You said that before.  _Detroit_. Like it meant something big, like it was significant.” He jiggles the key in the lock, pushes the door open. “I know you’ve had your doubts, Dean,” he says. “We all have. But Sam might have gotten out of there. And even if he didn’t, it was real important to him that we have faith in him. Shouldn’t we at least try?”

Castiel reaches inside and snaps on the lights, sighs. “Sam would have called us by now if he was safe, Bobby, don’t you think? And Lucifer is –  _persuasive_.”

Persuasive like Alastair was, Dean thinks, and he wonders abstractly how many times Sam might have been made whole again. The lights hurt his eyes, and he squints into the brightness before he blinks his lids tight closed and lists over, and he’s numb. “You don’t know, Bobby,” he whispers. “You have no clue what it’s like, to be  _persuaded_. And you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

“Well maybe if someone would tell me,” Bobby scathes out, as he pushes the wheelchair into the den.

“Detroit, it’s… significant,” Castiel says cautiously from behind them. “Dean…?”

Dean braces his head on his hand, leans into his clammy palm. “Tell him, just tell him,” he murmurs, and he can feel the chair moving again. “Need to lie down. Detroit… s’worst place in the galaxy. It’s blessed with suck. Best part about Cleveland is that it isn’t Detroit. Shouldn’t even be in the fuckin’ dictionary…” He goggles up at the old man as Bobby and Castiel lift him up and maneuver him onto the bed in the den. “Detroit is exactly how you imagine it.”

“Why don’t you tell me how you really feel, son?” Bobby says. “And aside from all that, And aside from all that, I—”

“You haven’t called me son since…  _since_ ,” he says stupidly. “And Sam said yes in Detroit.”

And he closes his eyes, turns his face away and drifts.

***

There’s a cadaverous old man dressed in black who looks like Severus Snape sitting on a rock about ten feet away. The guy is hunched over like a vulture, hands clasped on his thighs, gazing out over the precipice into a cerulean blue sky, and Dean muses that it’s nine kinds of weird, since his last memory is of Gabriel’s skinny features creasing with worry because nothing was happening, Michael wasn’t responding, wasn’t getting better. And he can remember that Bobby pressed his hand up to his mouth and turned away, and Castiel looked down at him and said his name, said both of his names, and his face crumpled up with grief and tears. And then Castiel heaved their brother up by his shirt collar and hollered down into his face, while Gabriel just stood there and took it, his own sadness shadowing his eyes.

But what the heck, the weather is great here, and he isn’t hurting, so he hails the guy. “Where is this place?”

The man glances over briefly, doesn’t respond, turns his gaze back to the front.

Dean starts picking his way over the stony ground. “Hey. Where are we?” he says again, as he ranges alongside the man’s rock. “What place is this?”

“The Toroweap Overlook,” the man supplies distantly, as he keeps staring out. “We are three thousand vertical feet above the Colorado river, about fifty miles downriver from the south rim and seventy miles upriver from the skywalk.”

Dean sits his own butt down on a flat rock, rests his chin on his knees, and spends a few minutes drinking it in. “I always thought I’d come here with my brother,” he says randomly.

The man snorts out in amusement. “Which one? Your brothers are legion, Michael. For they are many.”

And that prickles. “Don’t talk about us like we’re demons,” Dean replies shortly.

“The legions of Heaven and the legions of Hell are two sides of the same coin, Michael,” the man says. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, in my experience it usually is a duck. Even if it is a different color.”

“Yeah, well I avoid clichés like the plague,” Dean bats back, and he shrugs. “Sam, actually. But he never seemed all that interested.”

The admission sends a sudden bolt of regret streaking through him, for the years of driving desolate roads across the lower forty-eight without ever seeing beyond the next kill, the next bar, the next nameless drunken screw in the toilets, without ever checking out, without ever letting down his guard, without ever seeing the good, the right and the pure, regret for constantly looping a quest he inherited before he even really knew what it was and what it meant. And regret for the way it crushed his hope, his brother’s too, regret because part of him died when that happened, regret because he knows it couldn’t ever be any other way, because maybe they never really had any control to begin with.

He senses rather than sees the figure glance down, the curl of his lip. “And now it’s too late for Sam Winchester, Michael,” the man drawls sonorously. “So instead you visit this place with Death as your guide.”

 _Too late_. It’s acute, the way it skewers into him. He feels his pulse start throbbing above his right eye, and he’s well aware of how he flinches. “That’s melodramatic,” he says, and he tries to be curt, but his voice wobbles. “If par for the course.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, slants his eyes up, manages a thin smile. “So how’s it hanging, Death? And I assume this is a dream?”

The Horseman nods graciously. “You assume correctly, Michael. It is the only way I can talk with you.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean grunts back noncommittally, even as he hikes his eyebrows up suspiciously. And the weird just ramped up to eleven, he thinks, because why Death should want to talk to him instead of squishing him underfoot like a bug is beyond him. But what the fuck, he plays along, hopes that myth about dying in real life if you die in your dreams isn’t true at the same time as he wonders if it even applies to what he is now. “So what now, we play Battleship?” he says wearily. “Or have you come to reap me? Given that you’re on my brother’s team?”

“You have a vastly inflated sense of your own importance,” the Horseman says placidly, and then he smiles, just barely. “But, since you raised the subject… is that what you still want?”

Dean shivers, swallows, deflects. “Things like you don’t scare me as much as they used to,” he offers, and he hopes it sounds convincing. “I’m right up there with you on the totem now. And you can’t do anything to me that hasn’t already been done.”

Death smiles properly now, regards him thoughtfully for a long, dragged-out moment. “Perhaps you should be scared, since I know all your secrets,” he says then, softly, intimately. “Everything you want, and need, everything you yearn for. How you don’t want this cup you’ve been given. How you crave peace, tranquility, rest. And how ironic it is that all these years it needed only one mistake, one slip, one split second of inattentiveness, meeting that one lucky demon, or werewolf, or wendigo, or angry spirit. How ironic it is that you killed with abandon, but that you had to be lucky every single fraction of a second of your life. How ironic it is that whatever killed you would need to be lucky only once, one single fraction of a second of luck. And yet they never were, even though you wanted it, and longed for it, and dreamed of it. The peace it promised.” The Horseman pauses, sighs out reflectively. “And how ironic it is that even when you seized your chance and welcomed it, there was no peace… and how ironic it is that you killed with abandon even in death.”

Dean bristles hostility, thinks he might even flick poisonous porcupine spines out of himself. “Yeah, well irony can be pretty ironic,” he says tightly. “And I didn’t deal for my brother as some sort of suicide by hellhound. I didn’t seize my chance. And I didn’t welcome it either.” There’s no point in denying the rest of it, he thinks, so he doesn’t, he just glowers.

The Horseman considers him for a moment. “You’re missing my point,” he says finally. “You’re thinking like Dean Winchester.” His eyes narrow critically. “But you’re not really him and never were. You’re Michael. The good soldier, the obedient son, the righteous man, doing your duty and following the path that was set for you. Alerting Azazel to the Winchesters, and making your demon deal, so you could cast yourself into the Pit to fulfill the prophecy and break the first seal.”

Dean freezes for a moment, and it’s a vicious silence. “That’s crap,” he says finally, low and savage, through a frown. “There was no  _path_. I didn’t tell Yellow Eyes anything. What does that even mean? It makes no fuckin’ sense.” He forces out a humorless laugh, describes air quotes with his fingers. “And you forgot coming to theaters near you this summer.”

Death raises an elegant eyebrow, isn’t deterred, comes right back at him with a smooth forehand right down the tramline. “These prophecies can be such complicated things,” he concedes mildly. “I find a flow chart helps, but I’ll go step by step for you. Step one, it was prophesied that Michael would kill Azazel. Step two, you told Azazel that you would be the one to kill him. It’s why your grunt was told to send you back in the first place. And step three… that was how Azazel knew Sam Winchester would be the vessel he sought for his  _grand plan_  to free Lucifer and build Hell on earth. It had to be brothers, you see. It had to be  _Michael’s_  brother.”

It’s like a gut punch that slams right through his middle and out the other side with his vital organs clutched in its grip, cauterizing his nerve endings as it rips him apart inside. It leaves Dean hollow and burnt out, wheezing for breath as the air is forced out of his lungs, and he rewinds to that moment, hears himself, right up in Azazel’s face,  _look into my eyes, you sonofabitch, ’cause I’m the one that kills you._ He squeezes his eyes shut, swallows back red-hot acid bile, slams his hand up to his mouth, falls forward onto the other hand, hacks the searing fluid into the dirt, chokes out a dehydrated, incoherent, shivering protest. “That isn’t… I didn’t do that, I didn’t…  _know_. Christ.  _Sammy_.”

“There was always a subtext, Dean,” the Horseman chides languidly. “You always were the good son, doing your Father’s bidding, even if it doomed your brother. Because Michael was always there, after all.” And now he’s implacable. “ _Driving_.”

Dean swipes his mouth harshly with his sleeve. “I didn’t tell Yellow Eyes that so he’d –  _fuck_.” He spits out again, and the raw, shriveling sensation in his guts makes him groan out in distress. He knows his voice cracks with his own desperation. “I didn’t know any of that. I made the deal to save my brother. It wasn’t a puzzle piece in some grand plan.” He looks up at the Horseman through watering, burning, blinking eyes. “And I didn’t red flag Sam to Yellow Eyes,” he whispers. “There’s no subtext to any of it. That isn’t how it was… I wasn’t –  _Michael_  wasn’t – always there.”

The Horseman smiles again, and his tone manages to sound irritable and patient at the same time. “What came before is academic. Dean’s memories are academic, memories of a reality that no longer exists, that never really existed. A shadow play.” He pauses a beat. “But I’ll humor you,” he continues and his voice is light now, mocking. “I’ll compromise. Perhaps it was a mixture of Dean throwing himself in the Pit to save his brother, and Michael throwing himself in the Pit to doom his brother.” He nods sagely. “After all, that is what you did, isn’t it? Doomed your brother even as you saved him. How convenient it is for Heaven’s own grand plan to defeat the devil and build Paradise on Earth.”

Dean can feel the knot of tension in his stomach pull even tighter. “There was no grand plan,” he insists again, and he knows it’s futile.

The Horseman stares back. “If you say so,” he retorts acidly. “I suppose we can call it a hidden agenda if you prefer. And how advantageous it is for the hidden agenda that your brother is alive to meet his destiny alongside the good soldier who blindly follows his orders without questioning their intent and who is giving them.”

Dean stares ahead, resolute. “Listen, you sonofabitch,” he spits out. “I may be him, but I’m me too and my memories are real. I made that deal to save my brother, because I love him and he’s a good man who deserved better than some demon-blood Yellow Eyes spawn backstabbing him in the dark. My life wasn’t a shadow play before this Michael thing. It was  _real_. And I made the same choice then. I wasn’t following anyone’s orders.”

Death is still studying him, and when he replies his tone is one of finality. “You know I’m right, Michael. From the beginning, your Father knew this was how it would end. You did too, deep down inside, and you played your part to perfection. As you will continue to do.” And he curls the corners of his mouth up in a smile that is at once sympathetic, understanding, and patronizing. “For the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of His kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” He nods thoughtfully. “Of course the question now is what you decide to do about all of this. Now you have considered all of the steps along the path to this moment. And how you were…  _steered_.”

And the words echo around Dean’s head, and  _fuck_ , he doesn’t ever want to think there was anyone else steering, wants to believe he saved his brother for his brother, wants to think he did it as himself, as Dean Winchester, that no one was pulling the strings and that there isn’t even the remotest possibility that he wouldn’t have given himself up for Sam if it weren’t for Michael pushing him in that direction, Michael pushing him for an ulterior motive that had nothing to do with his grief, and his loss, and the emptiness, and despair, and wretchedness of Cold Oak. But even while he wants to believe it, there’s a minute where he reflects on the million random acts of chance, the million random choices, each one of them bringing him here to this point, this choice, and this destiny. And  _fuck that_.

“No,” he says, and his voice cracks on the word. “You’re wrong. I won’t be a part of this, and I’m not throwing anyone in the fire. I’m not a hammer, and I have had it to here with being manipulated by my family, whoever they may be. Fuck you, fuck orders, and fuck the grand plan to Hell in a handbasket. There’s a right and a wrong here… I have free will, I have a choice, and I’ll  _damn_  well make my own destiny.” He stops for a second, sucks in a breath, and suddenly he can hear his own words to Castiel, clear in his head. “And it’s a lot better than being some Stepford bitch in Paradise.”

The Horseman  _tsks_  laconically. “Is this mutiny? What will your Father think, Michael?”

Dean surges bolt upright, takes a few steps towards the edge of the drop, leans to pick up a rock and hurls it violently into the ravine, hears it echo as it clatters its way down until it falls silent again except for the buzz of insects and the cries of far-off birds. “I don’t give a damn about my Father’s orders,” he grits out. “He told me I’d have to kill my brother… he dumped that on me, and then he left. What the fuck kind of dad does that?” He can hear a note of hysteria in his voice, and he fists and unfists his hands rapidly, closes his eyes, and deep breathes his heart down from the jump into hyperspace to something manageable.

“It’s disobedience.”

“I don’t give a damn if it’s disobedience,” he snaps back roughly. “See, you might want to look at all this as Michael making me what I am, and how everything I’ve done was all him. But maybe I’m what makes him who  _he_  is. Maybe  _I_  call the shots now. Maybe I’m the boss of  _him_.”

The reply is succinct, satisfied. “Good. And let’s hope there were no hikers further down.”

Dean whirls back round, exasperated. “ _Good_?” He clutches at the back of his neck with both hands, tips his head back to stare up into the blue for a few seconds, grounds himself before he looks back at the Horseman. “Look, what the fuck is this, anyway? You came to me. What do you even want if you aren’t here to reap me?”

The Horseman’s gaunt, shadowed face splits in a hideous grin, and his dead eyes are suddenly sparking alight with sly satisfaction. “I want to make a deal.”

“Word to the wise, pal, you look even creepier when you do that,” Dean snaps, and he bends to pick up another rock. “And I don’t make deals anymore. I’m my own man, remember?” He weighs the rock in his hand, tosses it up into the air, catches it, pulls back his arm to let it fly, stands there then, sort of aimlessly really, and scuffs his boots in the loose shale underfoot.

“I’m not unsympathetic to your dilemma, Michael, despite what you may think.” The Horseman’s voice is curiously gentle now, might even be sincere. “I know that you feel torn. I know that you’re being pulled in two directions, by your grunt and your friend on one hand, and your sense of duty and your dreams of peace on the other. I know the thought of destroying your brother tears and terrifies you… and I know that you hunger and thirst to watch him die at your hands, like he is meant to. And yes… I know you do have a choice, in a very real sense. An alternate course of action. Plan B.”

Dean feels himself tense then, feels his jaw lock, finds his hands are shaking, and he rams them down into his pockets. His voice is ragged and hoarse. “How do you—”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter how,” the Horseman says, suddenly brisk and dismissive. “And don’t panic, I haven’t told your brother.”

“You haven’t told my…  _why_  haven’t you told my brother?” And Dean trails off, studies the Horseman, sitting there, hunched and forbidding. And now suddenly his brain is whirring, and he’s thinking, wondering, surmising, and he’s twisting his mental Rubik’s cube around, left, right, up, down, doubling back, until all the colors match. And he pulls his hands out of his pockets and rests them on his hips, because they aren’t shaking anymore, and he feels composed, collected, maybe even serene. “You tell me I have a vastly inflated sense of my own importance,” he says, and his voice is rock steady. “But you want to make a deal. With me.” He smiles. “That means I’m important to  _you_. That I have something you want.”

Death dips his head minutely, grudging confirmation.

Dean eyeballs the saturnine features for a minute that stretches out between them like taffy. “Well. Here we are, taking potshots at each other’s battleships after all,” he says easily. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

The Horseman stares him down. “All I really want is to sit here and look at the view,” he replies. “Look at it, Michael. It’s one of the many embodiments of this world’s unsurpassed beauty, and your Father’s awesome power. Look at how beautiful your Father’s creation is. Look at it, and contemplate your own insignificance in comparison.” He leans forward slightly. “Honestly, I wish you would.”

Dean doesn’t know if the old guy is pushing him with his Horseman mojo, but he treats it like the order it is, complies, turns, stares out at the vista sweeping before him. The sun hasn’t long risen, and it bathes the blue morning with its light, a pastel glow where the land meets the sky on the other side of the canyon. He can see the colors etched into the bedrock as he sweeps his eyes down walls dull with gray, buff and brown, flaring with orange, pink and red, layered limestone, sandstone, shale, granite, schist, slopes, cliffs, crags, vertical fractures, pillars of rock intercut by flat-topped mesas and buttes. It’s vast, a wilderness, breathtaking, and he chokes out a soft, formless noise of joy at its glory.

“I am as old as this place,” the Horseman declares, suddenly wistful. He nods in affirmation. “Of course you know this already, Michael.”

Dean smiles crookedly, despite himself. “That’s random. And, yeah…  _old_.”And what the fuck, he thinks, might as well give it another shot of bravado while he’s still breathing. “You look good,” he says cautiously. “You won’t be getting carded at the liquor store, but you look good.” He flinches at the Horseman’s look: grim, hard, and heavy. “So you are sentimental about the view,” he throws out, as diplomatically as he can.

“Oh yes, I am partial to a room with a view.” The Horseman stares up at him, eyes narrowed and speculative now. “Of course, a room with a view costs more.” And he flicks his gaze back ahead, looks fixedly at the horizon.

Dean rubs at his jaw, can feel himself getting testy and confused again. “Look,” he says finally. “Aside from all the psychoanalysis and doublespeak, do you actually have a point?”

Death’s face contorts abruptly with distaste and displeasure. “Yes, I have a point,” he hisses sourly. “Your brother has me bound to him with some unseemly spell. He has me where he wants, when he wants. He is making me his weapon… storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, destruction, death. My reapers are no longer my own, they are entranced, enchanted, and enslaved. And I want this leash around my neck off.” He shakes his head in what looks like disbelief. “I’m more powerful than you can process, and I’m enslaved to a bratty child having a tantrum. ”

Dean looks straight into the Horseman’s eyes then, snorts out a false laugh. “I can relate,” he says dryly.

“You can unbind me if you choose to,” Death continues.

“If I destroy my brother?” Dean snorts. “I’m not fighting him any time in the near future, much less killing him. Your buddy Pestilence fricasseed me  _but_  good.” He grimaces dramatically. “Hate to tell you this, but it isn’t looking good for our hero.”

Death tilts his head, amused. “I think that when you wake you’ll find your injuries are no longer a problem, Michael.”

Dean makes his half-nod-half-smile-half-wink face in acknowledgment, tracks the Horseman’s hand as he raises it, and the ring glints in the sunlight, dull silver, obsidian stone in the center.

“You want this,” Death says flatly. “And I’m inclined to give it to you.”

Dean waits a beat, puzzled and wary. “You are?”

“I am. If you promise to be bound by my terms.”

And that pulls Dean right up, flips him back to Crowley’s cocksure confidence that he could waltz right into Bobby’s and make it out the other side, and the memory of how he couldn’t bring himself to let the knife fall, how even the thought of breaking his sworn promise filled him with self-disgust. “Your terms?” he ventures suspiciously. “And what terms might those be?”

“That you promise to do whatever it takes to put Lucifer back in his cage,” the Horseman says, and his eyes are knowing, his lips thin and pursed. “I like this world, and its inhabitants, Michael. I don’t want it or them annihilated. So I want your promise that when the time comes, you’ll throw your brother in that fiery pit and back into his cell with a smile on your face, no matter who he’s wearing. And I will give you the means to do that.”

Dean gapes inelegantly, gropes for words. “Let me get this straight,” he manages. “You bring me here and tell me all about how everything I’ve done has been setting me up for this destiny… that I’m going to destroy my brother and this planet, and jumpstart judgment day. And then you do a one-eighty and sign up for plan B. If I bind myself to you.”

Death shrugs. “Something like that. So. Deal or no deal?”

Dean can feel a muscle twitch in his cheek, feel his heart start to pound, because he somehow knows he’s full-steaming ahead with an iceberg looming, that two thirds of whatever he’s about to commit to is hidden beneath the surface of some murky, swirling sea, and that if he says the words they will sear his throat and tongue and shred his lips as they leave his mouth.

He stares unblinkingly into the Horseman’s empty eyes. “Death is a tree-hugger,” he marvels. “And he’s pro-life. Who’d have thunk? And no deal.”

And that gets a reaction, a slight tremor, and Death’s knuckles whiten as he grips onto his bony knees. “No deal?” he snarls.

“No deal. Sorry, Death, you lose. It was Professor Plum.”

Dean turns back to gaze out over the canyon, sweeps his hand expansively across thin air. “Look at this,” he says, and he shoots a look back over his shoulder, smirks down at the Horseman’s flinty-eyed annoyance. “Honestly, I wish you would. Nearly two billion years of this earth’s geological history exposed as the Colorado river eroded its merry way through this canyon. It took that water seventeen million years to do this. I always wanted to see it. And now I’m here, and you’re right, it’s a thing of wonder…” He glances back at Death again. “I suggest you look at it and contemplate your own insignificance, because next to this you don’t matter. What you want doesn’t matter. What matters is this. Isn’t that why you brought me here?” He makes his way back to his rock, sits down. “It’s like I said,” he offers. “I’m not a hammer. But I’ll humor you. I’ll _compromise_.” 

And suddenly the words spill out smoothly. “I’ll throw my brother in that fiery pit and back into his cell, and I’ll do it no matter who he’s wearing at the time.” His voice is assured, certain, decisive, and he isn’t remotely perturbed. The words don’t hurt, and his heart beats slow and steady in his chest. “But I’m not binding myself to you. If I do it, it’ll be because it’s the right thing to do, to save this world and everyone in it. Not because someone new is jerking my chain down the road.” He slants his eyes sideways. “You can give me the means to do it,” he says, and now he injects a note of menace. “Or I can take it. Because I’m running this show.”

The Horseman regards him through a long, weighty silence, and then he tips his head. 

“I believe you have sunk my battleship, Michael.”

***

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Continued in chapter 4   
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	4. Under an Atomic Sky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers up to S6; AU after Point of No Return

Water is dripping on Sam’s lips and he pokes his tongue out, catches the moisture on its tip, swirls the liquid around the inside of his mouth and it thickens with claggy saliva so that when he swallows it, it’s the consistency of a protein shake, and it tastes like copper, and it tastes like copper because—

He snaps his eyes open, stares up, and it’s foggy and blurred, like he’s looking through a steamed-up window. He starts to push up on his elbows and sinks back onto something soft,  _mattress?_  Pain scintillates through his body like electricity, and he can almost hear its buzz, and he wonders if his hair is floating wild with static. He slaps a hand to his brow, because time slowed to a crawl in that second after the gun fired, and the bullet drifted lazily towards him like some large, lumbering insect, and he remembers thinking how fucking anticlimactic it all was, remembers the dull thud of the impact and how the lights flicked off forever.

Only not so much, and there’s only one possible explanation for why he’s alive now, and it sends terror streaking through him, knotting him up inside like a rag rug. He can hear something, wild, incoherent sounds that he suddenly realizes are coming from him,  _fuck-fuck-fuck-oh-my-fucking-God-Dean-fuck-fuck_ , and another voice, muffled by his own swollen ears.  _Perforated ear drums_ , he thinks wildly, and he remembers hands crashing in, and each side of his head exploding. He swallows back his panic and as his throat undulates, the sting of inflammation trills from his jaws out to his ear canals,  _otitis media, ear infection_. He gets a mental image of his brother flopped on a motel bed, pale and listless, with his ear resting on a hot water bottle and he can hear Dean complaining,  _can’t hear, bitch, life should have closed captions,_   _Christ, feels like I’m giving birth to my brains through my ear, worse than fuckin’ labor, Sammy, must be, at least they get epidurals and the kid comes out eventually_ …

 The voice is repeating his name from far away, like he’s hearing it while he’s swimming underwater, and he breathes himself back down to earth, sniffs experimentally, feels a pop that throbs out into his cheeks.

 “Sam. It’s okay, man, relax. Relax, or you’ll just make it worse…”

 A hand is pressing him back down, insistent, and he recoils, tries to wriggle himself away from it, ends up falling back exhaustedly and gasping out his discomfort like a beached fish while he flails around with his hand. “Dean,” he chokes out. “Dean…” And through his confusion there’s this flood of relief, that his brother is okay, and that he isn’t breathing because the devil wants to wear him to the Prom but because Dean magicked him back.

 The reply is low, apologetic. “No… Adam, it’s Adam. Sam, can you hear me?”

 Sam squints through the debris field floating across his line of sight, spots, strings, blobs, like the great Pacific garbage patch is clogging up his optic nerve. “My eyes,” he chokes out. “Whoah… flashing. Light.” It streaks across his vision like a comet. Like a fallen angel. He tries to focus through the blur, finally pinpoints the face peering down at him, and it extinguishes his hope like a bucket of water upended over a smoldering cigarette butt.

“Adam,” he manages. “You okay?”

He sees the head shake. “Am  _I_  okay? Fuck, Sam…  _you_ , are _you_  okay? You’re a mess, what did those guys do to you?”

Adam’s voice is thin and reedy with panic, rising in pitch, and Sam shakes himself into some sort of calm, takes charge, reaches out a hand again, grabs at fabric. “Fine. Be fine,” he croaks wearily, and he’s trying to jump his brain onto the next page, trying to think past his own worry, get this mess into some kind of order. “Calm down. Can you give me a sitrep?”

His brother’s voice stutters. “Calm… S-sitrep? Sam, I don’t even know what that is, what’s a sit—”

“Situation report,” Sam mutters, and he finds he’s poking his tongue out through a gap there at the front, and he groans. “Dammit. I thought I imagined that bit.” He clenches his jaws, peels back his lips. “Whaddya see?”

He can hear Adam suck in a pained, horrified breath. “Uh… I’ll put it this way. I hope you have dental.”

Sam heaves out a bottomless sigh. “Had to be the teeth,” he mutters. “All these years, and they finally got the teeth.” He flicks his eyes up. “Did they hurt you?”

Adam scrubs at his hair. “No… no. It just – there was this huge explosion, the whole place rocked, some guy came up from behind and clocked you, and they put a bag over my head and dragged me out of there.” He shrugs. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been here. They dumped you in here a while back. I thought you were dead. Or dying, maybe.”

Sam grimaces. “Oh, been there… done that.” He coughs, groans. “Are we still at Nivaeus? And what happened to you back in Zachariah’s room?”

His brother throws up his hands, helpless. “I have no idea where we are, Sam. I have no real idea what’s going on here… and the room,  _man_  – there was noise, unbelievable noise, bright light. I couldn’t get out of there. But then the door just opened. I made a run for it, thought you guys might still be there, but that woman, Meg, she jumped me.” His tone goes sheepish, embarrassed. “She’s pretty strong for a girl.”

“Don’t remind me.” Sam shudders at the memory of her silky purr rumbling through his body, how she used his hands to kill and hurt, throws up a prayer of thanks for the day Dean casually mentioned that devil’s trap tattoos might be the best way to avoid being possessed while naked and showering or _naked and giving it to some hot chick, Sammy_. “And she isn’t a girl. Not any more.”

“Yeah,” Adam says ruefully. “I figured that one out pretty fast.” He shuffles around Sam, maneuvers his way up on the mattress next to him, and leans back against the wall. “Looks like they worked you over pretty good.”

Sam plucks up a handful of his shirt, lifts his head up to examine it, sees red splashes, splotches and starbursts that look like he just got back from a hard-fought paintball tournament out in the woods with the guys from Accounting. “Yeah,” he sighs. “You got that right.” He closes his eyes at the memory, because there were a few primal screams in that male bonding experience for sure, and as he blinks pain flares. “God,” he groans. “My eyes. I think I have detached retinas. And my ears are exploding.”

“I think you need a doctor, Sam,” his brother replies earnestly.

“How did you get to be so smart?” he replies crabbily. “Did you get a handle on how many of them there are?” He pats at his jacket, pocket empty, cellphone gone. _Figures_ , he thinks.

“Well, Meg,” Adam considers. “The guy who clocked you… maybe two more?”

Sam bites back a groan as he turns his head too sharply. “One of them a guy, mid forties or so? Fair hair, soft spoken… their boss, maybe?”

Adam shakes his head. “I don’t think so. But honestly, I wasn’t paying that much attention a lot of the time. And, bag over head.”

Sam bites his lip, doesn’t want to look down. “Uh, Adam. My knees. How do they look? Ankles too…” They aren’t getting out of here if he can’t walk, he thinks numbly.

“That’s the weird thing, Sam,” his brother replies from up above. “I mean – it looked like they’d shot you or something, there are bullet holes in your jeans, blood everywhere. It was fucking terrifying, man, I didn’t know what to—”

“Adam.” Sam lifts a hand, plants it on his brother’s leg, grips it for a minute. “Take it easy. Okay? We need to stay calm, work out our position, a plan of action.” He shifts his legs experimentally, and a dull ache pounds his knees for a moment, and the joints feel oddly stiff. But  _mobile_ , and he could weep with the relief. “Oh thank you. Thank you, God,” he murmurs.

“Yeah, they’re fine, no marks anywhere,” Adam supplies. “Why would they do that, why would they make it look like you were kneecap…” He trails off and when he continues his voice is faint. “You were. They did.”

“They did,” Sam confirms quietly.

Adam exhales sharply, sweeps a hand across his jaw, so _Dean_  that Sam’s breath catches in his throat.  “Well… why do you think they fixed that and not your teeth?” He seems to realize what he’s said, scrunches up his face in displeasure. “That sounded really stupid.  _How_  did they fix you?”

“Oh, their boss has ways and means,” Sam replies. “And it’s tactics. They fix you enough to keep you alive. They don’t care how you look, they just want you alive so they can—”

“Do it again,” Adam says softly. “So they can do it again.” He clears his throat, and now he’s louder, assertive. “I won’t let them take you.”

Sam smiles, sort of. “I appreciate the sentiment, believe me,” he says thickly, because who knew clear speech depended so much on having front teeth to bounce his tongue off. “But it’s probably best not to get in their way.”

It falls quiet until Sam hears a dull slapping sound, and he slants his eyes over, sees Adam’s fingers tapping a furious tattoo on his thigh.

“When you said their boss, you meant Lucifer,” Adam blurts out. “They want you to say yes. That’s what Meg said. That’s what this is.”

“That’s what this is,” Sam confirms wearily.

“Do you think you will say yes, Sam?” Adam says, and his voice is faint, uncertain.

Sam doesn’t reply at first, because his mind is spinning hectically with what that would mean, for Dean, for him. He coughs, presses a careful hand to painful ribs, because his body still throbs with discomfort, the muscle memory of fists, and feet, and bullets. “It’s never going to happen, Adam, no matter what he does,” he says, and maybe even a small part of him believes it. “I’m not making my brother kill me. I’m not doing that to him. And I’m not letting the devil use me to try to kill Dean.”

“Making your… using you – what does that… oh.” Adam’s voice dies away again for a moment. “It’s true then, what Meg said,” he says carefully. “That Dean said yes. That room, Zachariah… it’s all just a blur. I couldn’t really remember. But she said that Dean said yes.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Sam breathes ruefully. “Help me sit up?” He strains out a low groan as Adam heaves him upright and rests him back against the wall, and they sit there, shoulder to shoulder, while Sam wonders if Bobby went back in, if he made it out, if Michael’s mojo is doing its work and healing his brother. The memory of Dean flopped pliantly on the back seat of the Impala as he bled out has his guts lurching, churning, sloshing around inside him, like strong winds and fast currents are converging in there, forming rogue waves that wall up on every side of him to crash down and break him up into driftwood at any moment. He focuses on his boots, stares at them, breathes himself down from his anxiety, slow and steady.

“Sam, uh…” Adam intrudes uncertainly. He stops, starts again. “They could, you know –  _do_  things. Again. Things that would make you say yes. I mean – more than they’ve already done.”

Sam stifles a yawn. “There’s nothing they can do,” he says wearily. “There is no incentive he can possibly give me to make me say yes. It would mean destroying – everything.”

“Well… what if he does something to me?”

Sam pauses, stares ahead of him for a stretched-out moment before he answers. “I’m sorry Adam. There’s more than you at stake here. More than me at stake too.”

Adam clears his throat. “No, Sam… it’s okay, really. I get it. Well…” He snorts out a hollow laugh. “I’m trying to, anyway. We are the world, we are the people… can’t risk any of that. I guess.”

Sam tilts his head to look at the younger man, finds him staring back, white-faced and huge-eyed. “I guess,” Sam replies simply. And he feels a wave of dull, solid nausea, and he closes his eyes and tries not to think about anything.

***

Jessica is in the kitchen, and she’s wearing one of his shirts. It falls to mid-thigh so he can see long, sleek, coltish legs that travel down and end with perfect pink polished toenails, and she must be fresh out of the shower because her hair is wet, pinned up in a haphazard bun with damp tendrils wisping down. She snaps squares of cookie dough off a larger tablet, glances over her shoulder at him and smiles, and her overbite is as gorgeous as he remembers it. She winks. “Pillsbury Doughboy, Sammy,” she says. “No point in me baking them from scratch this time. After all, no one’s eating these babies, are they? They’re gonna burn.”

He gapes and she nods, and her eyes are huge and liquid with sympathy. “Yeah, it’s that day, Sam,” she says. “In fact we just spoke on the phone. You and Dean are a couple of hours away, but I have a test in the morning so I’m whizzing these up for you boys before I hit the sack for an early night.”

He swallows. “This can’t be,” he whispers, but in his head he’s screaming that he wants it to be.

“Oh, it can, Sam,” Jess says airily, and she has all of the squares laid out on the baking tray now, and she slides it into the stove, leans over the sink and soaps up her hands, shudders dramatically. “I hate the way that stuff gets under my nails.”

He’s sitting at the table, doesn’t know how he even got there. And she ruffles his hair as she passes by to sit opposite, and a mug of steaming hot chocolate appears, because she always drank one at bedtime.

“Have you asked him yet?” she says casually, as she takes a sip.

“Asked…” he stammers. “Asked him? Who? Asked who what?”

She rolls her eyes, pouts. “Michael, silly.”

“Michael… I don’t know – why? What? I mean, what would I—”

“Oh, come on, Sam,” she chides teasingly. “Have you asked him to send you back yet? Back to now, to  _here_? So you can do something about all of this?”

And he knew really, even if some small part of him hoped. “You’re not—”

She points up at the clock. “Look at the time, Sam,” she says witheringly. “Brady gets here in five minutes. He’s going to hang out for a while, and we’ll have a Bud. And when I’m getting up to see him out, he’s going to take his beer bottle and smash it over my head—”

“Please don’t,” he chokes out. “I don’t want to—”

“It’ll knock me out some, but not all the way,” she continues amiably. “I’ll feel blood trickling down my scalp, onto my face.” She shivers. “It’ll be ticklish, that’s the really weird thing.” And she smiles. “He brought a knife too, Sam. And he’ll drag me across the—”

“Fuck, please, don’t.”

She snakes her hand out across the table, grips his wrist lightly. “It doesn’t have to happen, Sam,” she says urgently. “You know the angels can bend time. Michael said no, but you could do it. Say yes, and you could come back to me. You could make a difference, change things for me… change things for  _us_.”

Her skin is cold against his, and when he looks down, her red-polished fingernails look like they were dipped in blood.

“You were going to ask me, weren’t you?” she murmurs. “It would have been you and me, for always. House, kids, dog—”

“It isn’t you,” he chokes out.

She considers, smiles. “But it could be,” she says softly. “It could be me, Sam. If you came back.”

And it’s right there, the desire to scream out his agreement, and welcome the devil with open arms, the temptation to go back to that night and tell his brother he isn’t going anywhere, that this is the best thing that ever happened to him and he isn’t fucking this up to go searching for a man who disowned him because he dreamed of getting out. He imagines it now, his brother’s look of disappointment, resignation, maybe a sarcastic aside, and how he’d walk Dean back down to the car, and there would be an awkward moment of promising phone calls that would never happen before the car pulled away and up around the corner. And then he’d go back upstairs and she’d be keeping the bed warm, and she’d snuggle up and ask him to tell her all about Dean.

He bites down on his tongue so hard he draws blood, fights the temptation. “But it wouldn’t be me,” he whispers desperately. “It wouldn’t be  _me_.”

Not-Jessica tilts her head to one side. “She wouldn’t ever have to know, Sam. You could be together and she wouldn’t know the difference.” Her eyes well up with tears, and her bottom lip quivers. “Michael won’t do it, he won’t do that for you. He doesn’t understand what you and Jessica had. But you could do it. If you say yes…”

He stares at her, and she’s poised, waiting. And he reaches across, deliberately peels off her fingers, places her hand back on the other side of the table. “Cas told me you’d tempt me,” he rasps. “She’d know the difference, believe me.”

She scowls, taps her fingernails loudly on the tabletop. “Castiel,” she says, and her voice goes ice-cold, her face hard and savage. “The little angel that could. He thinks he can, he thinks he can.” And she snickers malevolently. “I have a special place in my heart for Castiel, Sam. I can’t wait to see him again.” And then there’s a knock at the door, and she studies him for a second before she smiles again, soft and warm. “I better get that, I guess,” she says.

And he wants to scream no, and maybe he might even want to scream yes, but then he has to blink hard, because she’s blurring right there in front of him, changing, and now he’s staring into his brother’s face.

Dean’s eyes sparkle, and he smiles a shit-eating grin, and he’s young, he’s carefree, the shadows in his eyes lifted and gone, and he shines. “Hey, Sammy.” He shakes his head and _tsks_. “Look at the mess you get yourself into without me there. Jesus. Castiel should never have let you go to Detroit. He knew, Sam. He  _knew_. That’s…” He whistles softly. “Fuckin’ betrayal, if you think about it. And that isn’t even the worst of it, because—”

Sam slams his hand down on the table, because this corruption is somehow worse, his brother manifested by the devil and used for his works. “Shut the fuck up,” he says harshly. “You aren’t my brother.”

Not-Dean makes a face. “Well, if you must split hairs,” he snarks. He leans the chair back, hoists a leg up and across the table, studies Sam. “It’s sad, in a way. How everyone betrays you.” He shakes his head, and his voice is sincere. “I mean, look at mom. She gave you up before you were even a glint in dad’s eye.”

It makes Sam’s chest go tight, and his heart rate speed up. “She didn’t know what would happen,” he grates out. “And she—”

“And dad, well.” Not-Dean sighs. “When it came time to choose, he chose me. The good son. He’d rather sell his soul and suffer an eternity of hellfire for me than stick around to be a dad to you.”

Sam closes his eyes, breathes steadily, reminds himself he has never thought that, because he knows damn well that if he’d ever had to choose he would have chosen Dean, even if it did mean eternal damnation for his dad. “You aren’t him,” he insists.

Dean snaps his fingers together. “Of course, you’re right. I’m not your brother. But here’s the thing, Sammy: neither is Dean. Because he’s Michael. Dean was never real. Dean was an illusion. Dean ceased to be oh, I don’t know…” He does the math on his fingers. “Roughly fourteen weeks after sperm met egg.”

“That’s crap,” Sam hisses. “He’s my brother in all the ways that matter. He’s—”

“The cuckoo in the nest, Sam,” Not-Dean cuts in, and he stretches, laces his fingers behind his head. “You’re the only real Winchester. Michael took your brother from you.” He smirks. “You want to know how it all went down? How Michael whispered in your mom’s ear while she slept, how he visited her in her dreams?”

Sam can feel his jaw go slack and his eyes grow wide. Not-Dean nods, and his eyes pierce right into Sam, laser-intense, like they’re stabbing right into his soul, and his gaze is like sin, like persuasion, and like a promise.

“You know we need consent, Sam. And baby Dean, well. Him being a minor and all, it had to be your mom who signed him up for this gig.” He lowers his voice to a bare, seductive murmur that trickles across Sam’s senses like a fingertip trailing along his skin, a caress that shoots straight to his groin and has him gasping as his cock twitches its interest. “Let me in, Mary…” Not-Dean sing-songs. “Say yes. I’ll watch over him, keep him safe forever… let me in. I can protect him, I can take care of him… say yes to me…” He nods reflectively. “Our brother had quite a thing going for your mom, Sam… you must have noticed. He always loved her a little too much.”

And Sam shakes himself out of his trance, because somewhere in the depths of that cold alien green that isn’t his brother’s eyes he can see Dean’s face, a mixture of awe and wistfulness as he stared at Mary, can see him shuffling over, to all intents and purposes a kid of four again, to wrap his big frame around her and offer comfort like he did back then. And Sam finds he’s trembling with anger now, fisting his hands so hard he can feel his nails slicing crescents in his palms. “You sick freak,” he chokes out. “Don’t you ever speak about my mom like that. Or my brother.”

Not-Dean’s whole body snaps from casual relaxation to dangerous energy, and his face splits in that familiar, loved, megawatt smile. “Michael… man,” he says lightly, enthusiastically. “Silver-tongued rogue. He can make people believe anything he wants them to, while he’s selling them down the river. He can even make them think he’d sacrifice himself to bring them back. Like it wasn’t all part of the plan.”

And Sam is confused now, he’s leaning into his hand, rubbing his brow like Dean does when he’s perplexed, anxious, distracted. “I don’t – what do you, what does that even mean?” He shields his eyes for a moment, tries to calm his breathing again, and when he looks up it isn’t Dean any more. It’s the Lucifer Sam knows, sandy haired and sad-faced, and his eyes are brimming with sympathy.

“Our brother set you up, Sam,” he says gently. “He led Azazel straight to your mother. And he brought you back for me, for this moment. He dragged you out of Heaven, where you were at peace, because he had an agenda all along, the same agenda as Zachariah.” He shakes his head, twists his features into appalled disbelief. “Remember what I told you about Detroit? Back in Carthage? Dean knows.”

Sam tries to find enough spit to help him form words, but he’s so dry in there now he can’t even peel his tongue off the roof of his mouth, and he shakes his head in mute denial.

Lucifer nods regretfully. “When Zachariah showed him the future, we were there, Sam, you and me. Because you say yes in Detroit, just like I told you. And Dean knows you say yes in Detroit, and he never told you about it.” He leans closer across the table. “What kind of brother would do that, let you walk into this without warning you? He betrayed you, can’t you see that? He isn’t even looking for you, Sam.” He flops back in his chair, sighs deeply. “Because he knows how this ends.”

Sam groans out, slips off the chair, and he’s shuffling back now, into the corner, rocking like a lunatic, running through it all in his head, and Lucifer’s voice follows him, stalks him, and it’s brutal and relentless, and it pares layers off him, but it’s so soft in his ear, so caring, so tender.

“Michael wants to stop me, Sam, and he’ll destroy the world to do it. But we can end all of this, now. I don’t want this fight. All I want is to walk free on this world my Father created. I don’t even want to kill Michael. I love my brother, Sam, more than you can ever know. I didn’t kill him in Carthage, did I? And if I could just talk to him, if I could just make him understand…”

Lucifer’s hands are insistent, sliding in on either side of Sam’s face, raising it to look at him, and Lucifer’s eyes are brimming with tears. “Say yes to me, Sam. Say yes to me, so I can talk to my brother and tell him that I love him, and I mean him no harm. Say yes to me, and then we can—”

Sam screams his brother’s name.

***

He comes awake with Adam pinning him down, hands gripping his shoulders hard, but he has a good thirty pounds of muscle on the kid and he rips an arm free and lands a wild haymaker that knocks his brother four feet away, onto his ass. He rolls clumsily, ends up on all fours, staring every which way, panting, squinting because his vision is still blurry and spotted, and he has to bite back a whimper because his ears throb with the motion. “Fuck. Fuck that,” he grates out harshly, as he breathes down his panic. “We have to get out of here.”

Adam is rubbing at his chin, lets out a grunt of discomfort. “Jesus, Sam,” he mutters. “I was just trying to help. You were having a bad dream. A really bad dream.” He sits and hugs his knees for a moment. “Look. I’m scared Sam,” he says then, and his voice is small, with a tremor. “What you said before, about more being at stake… I don’t have a very high pain threshold.”

And Sam gazes at the kid, reaches a hand up to his brow, rubs at the nugget of tension that’s pulsing away in the space between his eyebrows, pushes the vision to the back of his mind,  _just a bad dream_ , even as he’s wondering if saying yes in a dream would count as  _saying yes_. He flops back onto his own butt, and suddenly the diversion of his brother’s anxiety is almost a relief. “Adam, I don’t know what to say,” he sighs out. “I’m just – so fucking sorry you got dragged into this. If I’d known, known about you, I could have… I don’t know. Looked out for you. Shown you some stuff. Just in case.”

Adam sniffs. “Just you?”

Sam cocks his head, tents his brows.

“You said  _I_ ,” Adam elaborates. “Not  _we_. And Dean seemed pretty hostile back at your friend’s place. Like he wanted to drop me and keep running.”

“To avoid something like this.” Sam throws up a hand. “To avoid precisely this. We had words about it back then, when we thought the ghoul was you. He didn’t want you in the life.” He shrugs. “You had a future.”

Adam scowls. “Heck of a future, Sam. If I’d known what was out there, I could have fought back… maybe me and my mom might not have been drygulched by those monsters in the first place. I mean…” He trails off, chews his lip. “Something was bound to come. Wasn’t it? Because of John.”

“Look, Adam…” Sam meets his brother’s gaze, steady, quiets his voice back down to some semblance of reassurance. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But it’s kind of academic now. There isn’t anything we can do about what happened to you and your mom, and we have to stay focused on—”

Adam cuts in then. “But it means that whatever Dean said, maybe he was wrong. He might think he’s right all the time, but maybe he isn’t.” He pushes up abruptly, starts to pace. “What’s going to happen after all of this? Are you going to just cut me loose? On Dean’s orders? Because you know – like I said. Maybe he was wrong, Sam.” He scrubs a clawed hand through his hair. “Dammit all. Dammit. I could have had my mom back.” He stares down at Sam, and his eyes are shiny. “I could have had my mom, Sam. Zachariah told me that. But it was a fucking trap. It wasn’t me the angels wanted. It was Dean who was the special one. And just – dammit all, Sam.” He stands there for a minute and then he shrugs, shuffles back over and sits down again. “What does it matter?” he says thickly. “We aren’t getting out of this anyway.”

Sam leans into him lightly. “We are getting out of this, Adam. I’m working on it.”

His brother twists his head around, and he smiles crookedly. “Yeah, I can tell.” And then his features fall again. “What are you going to do, Sam?” he asks softly. “If we do get out. If Dean wants to cut me loose, what are you going to do? Are you just going to do what you’re told? Follow his orders?”

Sam pulls up his knees, rubs at the bones where they feel stiff and ache. “It wasn’t the same back then,” he says. “You were going to college, you had prospects. Dean – he didn’t want this life for you. But things are different now. He’ll want to make sure you’re safe.”

Adam raises his eyebrow, smiles weakly. “Different is right.” He shakes his head, and his face relaxes into disbelief. “Dean said yes… it’s –  _wow_.”

Sam shrugs, blows out. “Yeah. Something like that.” He rolls his shoulders, grunts at the twinge in his ribs, thinks he’d maybe ask Adam to break one or two and then holler for Dean,  _Michael_ , whoever he’s really been dealing with since Van Nuys, if he didn’t know his brother was in no shape to take on the devil after his run in with Pestilence. It’s a stark reminder of the fact help might not be coming, and that it’s time to get off his butt and start scoping the joint now he feels more human and his insides aren’t churning quite as aggressively. They’re on their own, he thinks with a shiver, and they need to get out.

“We need to move this along,” he declares, with a confidence he doesn’t feel. He gathers his legs under himself, pushes up to his feet, slowly, lethargically, sucking in a breath and counting down from ten as he does. He lurches over to the door and presses his ear flush to the wood. “Have you heard anything out there? Any signs of life?”

“Footsteps went by a couple of times… I didn’t hear anyone talking,” Adam says. “But Sam, this thing with Dean,” he continues. “It’s – huge.” His voice slips into awestruck sincerity. “He’s the archangel Michael. This is, like – the Terminator of angels. The Darth fucking Vader of angels. The Prince of Light… a saint. People _pray_  to him, for crying out loud. I can’t really wrap my brain around that.” He ponders it for a second. “Do you think he hears them?  _All_  of them?”

Sam thinks on it himself for a minute, wonders if his brother has been hearing the clamor of prayer in his head all this time without telling him. He raises a skeptical eyebrow. “I think he would have complained about it.” He listens for another second. “I know he hears the angels,” he says then. “Or he did, before they started leaving.” He rubs gingerly at one ear, winces at the twinge of discomfort. “You seem to know a lot about him. Michael, I mean.”

Adam nods. “Commander of the Host of the Lord. My mom, she was pretty religious.” His lips curl in a soft, intimate smile. “If she was here, knowing all this, just… well. She’d be telling me she was right after all. Dragging me to church again.” He nods fondly, and his voice goes low and regretful. “I miss her, Sam.”

“I never knew my mother,” Sam considers, as he tries the door handle, leans down painfully to examine it more closely, because his vision is still foggy and splotched with dark patches. “Not really. I was just a baby when she died. Dean remembers her, sort of.” He stops, ponders for a second how clear his brother’s memory of her really is, colored as it is by their glimpses of Mary Campbell as she was before they were even born, by what they saw  _up there_ , and by Zachariah’s twisted illusion of her at the end, with her rapier tongue and cruel words shredding Dean’s self-esteem into even tinier pieces.

“You weren’t alone when she died,” Adam ventures. “My mom had no family. She was it. I’m the only one left.”

“We’re the only Winchesters,” Sam replies. “Me, you.” He pauses, feels a chill travel up his spine as he remembers Lucifer’s words. “Dean too,” he continues firmly, and saying it feels like a small victory. “This life… it killed all of my family.” He snorts sardonically, can’t help it. “Sometimes more than once.” He glances over to his brother. “I’m really sorry about your mom, Adam.”

“You really didn’t know about us.”

“Not a clue.” Sam whistles. “I still can’t believe it, believe that dad had this whole other  _kid_.” He exhales sharply, shakes his head. “We thought mom was it for him. I mean – I guess we knew he wasn’t living like a monk. But this…  _man_. And you were having this totally normal life, while we –  _weren’t_.”

“When he was with us, it was just you and Dean?” Adam asks.

“Yeah… Dean raised me, really.” Sam turns his attention back to the door handle again, squints. “This is a standard pin-and-tumbler doorknob-lock combo,” he murmurs, and he pats himself down. “They took my lockpicks. But if we had something long and thin, I might be able to trip it. It isn’t rocket science.” He glances over. “You got anything? Seen anything? Has to be metal… a paperclip or a bobby pin, preferably two…”

Adam rolls his eyes theatrically. “No, I didn’t wear my hair up today, Sam.” He slumps there against the wall. “It must be weird – I mean, he must’ve been more like a parent than a brother.”

Sam thinks on it, frowns. “I didn’t really see it like that back then. I mean, I didn’t think of him as a mom or a dad, even if that’s what he was doing. He was still my brother. He just – took responsibility, saw I got fed, made me take a shower once a month. Early to bed on school nights. Homework. He used to have a cow if I didn’t bring home straight As.” He scans the room: bare, pretty much, except for some boxes stacked in the corner, and he limps over there, starts opening them up and rifling through the contents, and it’s just books and papers.

“Sounds like my mom,” Adam says wryly. “She had a lot on her plate. It could really suck the fun out of things.”

“He was tough when he needed to be,” Sam replies. “It was a tough life. He was just a kid himself. And dad, he – wasn’t the easiest when he was drinking. Dean used to have to clean up after him too.” He tips the box out, upturns it. “Yahtzee. Staples. They might be long enough.” He levers a fingertip underneath one of the thick metal clips, swears under his breath as the nail splits, sucks the bead of blood that wells up. He walks back over, lowers himself down, box and all.

Adam quirks his head, looks speculative. “I always wanted a big brother. But I don’t know if I’d want him bossing me around all the time. Doesn’t it drive you crazy? Feeling like you’re being controlled?”

Sam looks up from where he’s picking at the staple. “Uh… when I was a kid I guess it bothered me,” he says distractedly. “Just now and then. Like with every little kid who’s the youngest, I guess. There’s a pecking order.” He leaves off for a minute, rubs at his temples and groans. “God. My eyes.”

“Having him hand out orders though,” Adam muses. “Feeling like you’re being controlled. I don’t think I could put up with that.”

Sam stops, thinks on it a minute. “Well… there have been times when maybe I felt like I wasn’t getting my say,” he concedes. “Or, you know – getting my way. But it’s been him and me. A team, push-pull. Sometimes he has the last word, sometimes I do. Sometimes he says where we go, sometimes I do. Sometime I boss him… and believe me, he hasn’t been in control of me for years. Sometimes, Jesus…” He falters at the memory of deep brown eyes. “I wish he had been. There’s things I’ve done that just… well, let’s just say that if Dean had been in control, things might be different now.”

Adam chews his lip. “He seemed like he had a lot on his mind at Bobby’s place,” he suggests.

Sam runs a hand through his hair. “Something – bad. Happened to Dean,” he says softly. “And then this whole Michael deal. It was a pretty heavy load.”

“You mean Hell, what he did there,” Adam ventures, and he shrugs apologetically at Sam’s look. “Sorry. Zachariah really ran off at the mouth about him.”

Sam shivers. “He was pretty bad off afterwards. Post-traumatic stress, I guess. And he was distracted by it… I don’t know. He had a lot on his mind. It was just –  _tense_. And maybe there were times when it felt like he was off in his own world of pain and he shut me out…  and I did things I shouldn’t have done. There were things he let slide that he wouldn’t have if he’d been on his game. Things I was doing.”

His brother’s eyes are bright with sympathy. “Man, that can’t have been easy for him. Or you. Not being able to rely on him, him shutting you out like that. Sometimes it can be just as bad for loved ones.”

Sam smiles weakly. “Doctor Phil.”

Adam colors slightly. “I read it in the Reader’s Digest. My mom subscribed.”

The box clip is heavy duty now Sam has managed to rip it out of the cardboard. “I can’t believe it’s this hard to get these mothers out of here,” he gripes. “I wish I could see the damn thing properly.” He offers it to his brother. “Can you unbend that?”

Adam grips it between finger and thumb, squints down at it. “Are your eyes going to be okay, you think?” he asks.

“I don’t want to think,” Sam mutters, as he peers myopically down at the cardboard. “Every time I think about it I just come back round to blind hunter, and I don’t think there’s much job security in that.”

Adam taps his fingers on his leg. “He fixed you,” he says suddenly. “Lucifer. He did didn’t he? Your knees and all.”

“Yeah, he fixed me.”

“I guess if you said yes, he’d fix your eyes. Your teeth too.”

“I guess.”

Adam snorts. “Or you could just get really lucky and die before you have to hunt blind.” He flicks his eyes over, smiles, cackles.

Sam pauses from picking at the next staple along. And, it’s infectious and he doesn’t even really know why, but he joins in, sniggers at how utterly ridiculous it all is, and finally leans his head back and laughs long and hard, the frenzied, demented laughter of the certified lunatic he knows he’ll be at the end of all of this. They sit shoulder pressed to shoulder, giggle until Sam has to wipe away tears of mirth, and then it crosses the border into something else, something different, grief, and mourning, and sadness, and fear, and he falls silent.

“I’m glad to know you, Sam,” Adam says quietly. “It’s weird, but I feel this click with you. Like we could be really close if we let it happen. And I’m sorry but – I don’t get that from our brother.” He nods emphatically. “Reader’s Digest,” he repeats then, as he starts to force the metal. “There was this article about how the victim gets all the attention, but sometimes it’s worse for their family. You know, watching them go through it, and having to prop them up when no one’s propping you up. When you need support yourself.” He snorts. “You know, it’s selfish, how they wallow in it,” he muses. “How is it you stay so good with that? I mean – it must take real strength of character.”

Sam is wiping the wetness from his cheeks, glances over through his new bangs. “Dean didn’t wallow in it, Adam. He only spoke about it twice, maybe three times. To me, anyway. I think he spoke to Castiel about it, but there’s always been some – _thing_  – going on between them. Cas pulled him out. Cas was down there with him… he  _saw_.”

His brother nods slowly, makes his face quizzical. “So Cas understood him in a way you couldn’t?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“And now more than ever.”

Sam looks up again, questioning.

Adam shrugs. “Well, they’re both angels now aren’t they?” he offers. “They’re like their own little club.” He makes a critical face. “It’s like you and me on one side, and them on the other. Like Dean isn’t really Dean any more, like he isn’t really your brother. Like he’s Castiel’s brother.” He pulls ups, considers. “It’s pretty ironic when you think about it. If you said yes, he’d be your brother again.”

Sam cocks his head, stares hard at the younger man for a moment, because maybe there is a tweak of something writhing in his gut, something that might be jealousy, something that feels like unease, disquiet, but he can’t put his finger on what’s causing it. “I don’t feel like it’s us and them, Adam,” he insists faintly. “Dean’s still my brother. And anyway, Cas fell.”

Adam goggles at him. “Castiel  _fell_? Man.” He huffs out reflectively, scrunches up his face. “Alright, I don’t really know what that means.” And he smiles in satisfaction as he holds up the staple, unbent most of the way. “This do?”

Sam plucks the staple out of Adam’s hand, studies it closely. “Yeah, it’ll do. It means he fell from grace. So, no more angel mojo.”

“He’s human?” Adam marvels. “He fell for Dean? Why would he do that? Why would he want to give all that up, _lower_  himself like that – I don’t…” His eyes are fixed on Sam’s face, tired but unwavering, and then they crease up in concern and he tilts his head. “You okay Sam? Is it your eyes? Your ears? Maybe you should lie down again, I can try the lock…”

Sam rubs at the clenching sensation in his belly, sighs out. “I’m okay, just – we need to get out of here.” He pushes up to his feet again, staples clutched in his hand. “Let’s give it a try.” He crosses to the door, kneels down in front of it. “Okay, staple in.” He tests it right, left, feels it give fractionally on the right turn. “So, torque that way,” he murmurs to himself.

“How hard do you think it would be to control Lucifer?” Adam says suddenly, from across the room. “I mean, if he was in you. Or possessing you, or whatever it is they do.” He throws up his hands at Sam’s skeptical look. “You seem like a pretty strong guy. Character-wise, like I said. Maybe you could control him. Like – damage control.”

Sam huffs out feelingly. “There’s no way. I’ve been possessed, Adam. By Meg, in fact. When Bobby got her out of me I couldn’t even remember how she climbed on board, that’s how far gone I was.” His guts curdle uncomfortably at the glimpses she let him see, and the memory of Dean telling him what Meg used him for. “Castiel’s vessel told us being ridden by a garden-variety angel was like being chained to a comet. And this is  _Lucifer_.”

Adam hisses in sympathy. “Meg? Oy.” He pauses a few beats. “But now you mention it, if Dean’s all-powerful too, why hasn’t he come to get us?” he asks then. “I mean – shouldn’t he want to get you out of here before…” He trails off awkwardly and he doesn’t meet Sam’s eyes. “Just in case, I mean.”

Sam focuses his attention back on the lock, and he can hear it in his head,  _he isn’t even looking for you, Sam…_ He tells the voice to shut the fuck up, works the other staple in. “He can’t see us because of the sigils.” He can feel the pins in there, starts pushing on the first one. “Come to Sammy,” he coaxes.

Adam is pushing up himself now, stretching. “Oh yeah.” He frowns. “Sigils. Is it working?”

Sam hears the first pin click home. “Yeah, one down.” He chews his lip as he works the second pin. “Be a heck of a lot easier with proper picks.” And there it is again, the voice, taunting him,  _he knows how this ends_ , and Sam parries. “And he’s hurt too.” He eases the staple out, in again, and he can feel sweat beading on his brow. “Listen, Adam, if this works and we get out of here, just keep running okay?” he says. “No matter what you see, or hear. Just run. Try to get to Bobby’s. That’s Singer Salvage, Sioux Falls. You got that?”

Adam is squatting down next to him, peering in. “Yeah, okay. Sioux Falls, right. You said he’s hurt – did you mean Dean?”

“Yeah, they did something to him,” Sam mutters, as he eases the pin home. Click. “One of the Horsemen. Pestilence. Some toxin he mixed up… and he hurt him. He wasn’t doing too well, and Cas—”

He doesn’t even get the name out, he’s flying through thin air, slamming hard into the wall opposite, crumpling down to the floor, dazed all over again.

Adam prowls over, looks down at him, shakes his head in something like wonder, and his voice is as soft and tender, and as brutal, as it was in the dream. “That totally changes things, Sam,” he remarks. “You know, you could have saved me a lot of time and effort if you’d told me my brother was damaged three hours ago.”

***

Sam can hear his breath rattling out through his mouth, and it feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton in there, that gauzy stuff they pack inside soft toys. His eyes are at half-mast, and his vision is so blurred with blood and gritty floaters it’s like someone hung lace curtains across his eyes, but he can just make out a figure leaning against the wall beside the door. Generic demon guard, he supposes, not that he’s going anywhere fast ever again, but what the hell, he’ll keep his eyes peeled for a chance to get out even if he is dying.

His back is pressed up against something hard,  _wall?_ , his arms and legs flopped out in front of him like he’s a dog napping in the shade of a hot day south of the border. When he breathes in he can’t get to the top of the inhale any more, and each breath is a labored pant of effort, shallow, fast, then faster, then slow, so slow he thinks it might not even be worth the effort of doing it again.

Lucifer paces, gestures wildly and spits tacks. “That’s what you get, Sam,” he seethes. “For trusting a Horseman. They knew, they  _knew_. I made it crystal clear to those douchebags that Michael was off limits, that he was mine.” He pauses, leans into his hands, roars out apoplectic, incoherent anger that rises in pitch to a hoarse wail of fury.

And then it cuts off abruptly and Lucifer stands stock still for a moment before he rolls his shoulders, spins around and lowers himself to the floor next to Sam. He puts a friendly hand on Sam’s shoulder and pats him there, and Sam feels a slow chill of icy horror prickle across the surface of his skin. He tracks the hand as Lucifer raises it up to examine his knuckles, split on Sam’s jaw, but perfectly healed now, and the angel  _devil?_  pulls a face, tilts his head at Sam in a disturbing approximation of the amused-puzzled-tolerant-fond  _nothing else matters but you_  look Castiel so often wears on his face when he’s going eye to eye and nose to nose with Dean.  _Before_ , Sam thinks abstractly. Now Castiel just looks careworn and worried, like they all do.

“You aren’t looking too well, Sam,” Lucifer offers sympathetically. “Not that it means that much any more.” He clenches his fist, and Sam hears his knuckles pop. “You know, there’s a lot to be said for the rush of the bare knuckle fight,” he muses. “I wonder how it’ll feel to sink this fist into our brother’s pretty, pretty face, see it split and break. I wonder how it’ll feel to smash his bones one by one before I smite him to nothing but ashes blowing in the wind.” His face forms a joyful smile and he stares down at Sam with Dean’s eyes. “I’m calling that plan B.”

He flips over onto his belly then, lies flat out down there with Sam, steeples his fingers and rests his chin on them, and he’s bursting with glee, and his voice is conspiratorial. “Want to know what plan A is?” He frowns briefly. “Sam! Pay attention.” He smiles again as Sam drags his wandering pupils back to fix on him. “I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t want to kill our brother, Sam,” he confides earnestly. “And if he bows down before me with his face on my boots and his ass in the air, well. I can live with that as long as he can. That’s plan A. And if he can’t…”

He shakes his head, regretful, lowers his face so his brow rests on his hands now and all Sam can see is tufted dishwater blond hair. And then Lucifer laughs. “You know, Sam, it’s funny how things work out,” he says, and he looks up again. “All those years, all that effort to get you to right here and now. And I really held out for you, I gave it my best shot. But all along there was a spare. It’s just so damned ironic that there I was thinking I was going to have to go all-out for the designer meatsuit when the store brand fits all my curves snugly. And works just as well, especially if Michael isn’t firing on all cylinders.”

He smirks. “So, Singer Salvage, Sioux Falls. Guess I’ll drop by, pay our brother and his grunt a visit. I wonder which one of them I’ll break first…” He ponders, licks his lips. “What do you think, Sam? I mean, Castiel can be a sanctimonious little prig at times, can’t he? And he’ll be so easy to hurt now he’s vermin. Shall I rip his arms and legs out of their sockets while our brother begs me to show mercy? Or tear Michael to shreds while his pet screams his name?” He pushes up abruptly. “Decisions, decisions,” he remarks thoughtfully. “I must say that plan B sounds better all the time.”

Sam follows him with his eyes as he walks over to the door, and he glances back over his shoulder.

“Does my butt look big in this?” he asks. And then he winks, and he’s gone.

Sam stares at the space where Lucifer was, and he feels vague worry, vague because everything is dull in his brain and he’s tired, feels apathetic even though the atmosphere is charged and expectant, like the world is somehow aware of its own impending doom and is holding its breath in anticipation. And then he hears footsteps, the click of heels, and he’s being heaved up and leaned against the wall.

His head is swimming and he whimpers out dazedly, but he summons up some degree of numb concentration as he stares at the face in front of him, and his addled brain speaks her name even if his lips are having trouble doing it.  _Meg_.

“Is Michael really damaged?” she clips out sharply. She frowns, waves a hand across his field of vision, blows a sharp puff of air at him when that doesn’t get a response. “Sam. Come on, snap out of it. Is Michael really damaged?” She huffs out in irritation, reaches behind her, produces a knife, and she must see his fear flare in his eyes. “Don’t panic,” she sneers. “Just a little pick me up…”

He doesn’t see her cut herself but suddenly her wrist is pressed up close to his mouth and he can feel it burning his lips, sizzling on his tongue. He shakes his head,  _no,_  as frantically as he can manage,  _don’t want_ , purses his lips closed, but he can still feel it thrill its way to every part of him, lighting up his nerve endings, can feel his body rejoice and start pumping out adrenaline to meet it. And he jerks his hand up and grips her arm, pulls it tight to his mouth and sucks it down, mashing his lips against the wound until she pulls it away and he gasps out his need.

She cackles wryly. “You aren’t drinking me dry, Sammy,” she taunts, as her eyes flash black at him for an instant before they swim back to navy. “Just enough to get you lucid, kiddo. You aren’t going postal on me the way you did Famine’s people.” She grips his jaw with her hand, forces his face up to look at her. “Now. Is Michael really damaged?”

Sam studies her for a second, and her shoulders are rigid with tension under her sleek leather jacket, and her face is tight with anxiety under its perfect cosmetic mask. Her eyes are stark with worry as she blinks artfully curled lashes, and in the corners of his eyes he can see expertly manicured glitter-pink fingernails. Demon living the dream, he thinks suddenly. Like Ruby did. Terrified demon living a dream that’s about to turn into a nightmare. And he remembers Carthage, remembers what Castiel said afterwards, about Lucifer’s hordes not realizing their master would throw them into the flames first. “You know Crowley,” he lisps out dryly, past his broken teeth and raw lips.

Her eyes narrow, and she cocks her head. “And?” she says skeptically.

He stares her out even though he wants to let his eyes drift closed so he can sleep forever. “I know what Castiel told you in Carthage,” he whispers. “I know you know Crowley. Crowley doesn’t want Armageddon…”

He lets it hang there for a moment, makes his play. “Neither do you. You like the world, Meg.” He curls his lips up in a painful, false smile, slurs it out. “So. Let’s make a deal.”

***

He can feel the metal clutched in his fist before he even comes round properly, feels it hum slightly, like it’s charged with electricity. It’s hot too, and he thinks that when he unfolds his fingers he might see its shape branded into his palm like a stigmata. Its heat radiates outwards, in through his chest, where his hand lies, and the warmth curls and settles and burns in his belly, until it overflows and seeps tributaries that trickle and itch down his limbs, power, sharp and precise, resonating through his whole body.

He stretches luxuriantly. He doesn’t hurt anymore. He cracks an eye, glances around him, unfamiliar surroundings,  _motel?_ He looks to his left, and Bobby is sitting there gazing at nothing in particular, eyes locked front and center, on guard, a bottle of Jack propped on his gut. He’s miles away, doesn’t notice as Dean pushes up onto his elbows and gives his voice a try.

“Bobby.”

The old man doesn’t jump, just turns his head around slow, as if it hurts him to move it, and he stares with dark, vacant, red-rimmed eyes, until his brow creases in confusion and wonder. “Gabriel said you were dying,” he says. He raises a hand, scrubs at his beard. “And that the world would end soon.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Dean replies. “Especially when it’s Gabriel telling you. Where are we?”

“Motel,” Bobby says. “Castiel didn’t want to stay at the lot in case your brother showed up. He wanted you to die in peace.”

“I’m not dying,” Dean says softly.

Bobby doesn’t seem to hear him, and his gaze drifts back to focus on the middle distance. “It’s started already,” he says, and his voice is whiskey-harsh. “Massive quake in San Francisco. Smack bang in the middle of the morning rush hour, the Golden Gate and Bay bridges collapsed. It’s chaos. And a hurricane, Florida… they’re estimating category eight, if Saffir-Simpson even went that high. Thousands of people are dead… the Keys and Miami are submerged.”

 _Storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, destruction, death_ , and Dean can hear the Horseman’s doleful voice reverberating inside his head. “We aren’t walking into the flames,” he says. “Look at me, Bobby. I promise you. We aren’t going to burn.”

The old man swivels his face to stare at him again, his eyes at once shocked, overwhelmed. “I’m sitting here in a fuckin’ Super Eight, watching you die,” Bobby whispers. “And the end of the world is happening, far away. And soon it’ll get here. And it doesn’t mean anything anymore. I ain’t even really thinking about it, to be honest. I’m just waiting for it to get here.”

Dean hauls himself upright, presses his socked feet to the floor. “I’m not dying, Bobby,” he reiterates. “And the end of the world isn’t coming here, not if I can help it.”

“There’s reports coming out of New York and Boston,” Bobby replies lethargically. “People getting sick. The CDC hasn’t a clue what it is. The news is saying it’s like swine flu but worse. Crowley was here. He said it was Croatoan. They must have shipped a few batches out before we burned Nivaeus.”

It’s like a kick in the teeth that slams him forward in time to 2014, but Dean takes a deep breath in, and sighs it out slow and calm. He holds out his hand, and it shimmers there, the ring. “I said we aren’t walking into the flames. The end of the world isn’t coming here.”

Bobby squints at it, looks up at him, realization dawning, brows tented. “I don’t get it. I thought you said Sam had the ring.”

Dean smiles, makes his eyes flash bright and hopeful for the old man. “Not the same ring. I had a rendezvous with Death. It seems the grim reaper can dreamwalk too. And he isn’t too happy with my brother.” He pauses, considers. “Lucifer, I mean. Anyhoo. We had a pow-wow. Came to an agreement, you might say.”

A flicker of alarm ripples across Bobby’s features. “Did you _deal_? Did you deal with  _Death_?” There’s a sharp note in Bobby’s voice now, and his stare is penetrating. “Did you make another deal?”

Dean doesn’t blink either. “Look into my eyes, Bobby, and know that I would operate on my own brain stem with a Black and Decker drill before I ever deal again, no matter what’s at stake.”

Bobby looks away, shakes his head, unscrews the cap of the whiskey bottle with awkward fingers. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he mutters, and he takes a swig of the liquor, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Even if Sam shows up here in the next ten minutes with nothing more than a fuckin’ headache, we don’t have the other two rings. They’re in my safe back at the lot.”

And that’s typical, Dean thinks, and he leans into his hand, hears himself make a low, irritated growl. “Of course they are. Goddammit, Bobby.”

“Well, what was the fuckin’ point?” Bobby snaps then. “You were in no shape to use the damn things. And did you suddenly forget Sam says yes in Detroit? Did you suddenly forget what you really saw in your little trip to the future? What you left out of the Cliffs Notes version?” He knocks back another draught of the liquor, and it dribbles out the side of his mouth and trickles down into his beard. “Lucifer has his true vessel,” he continues heatedly. “And you said it’d be way harder to do this ring thing if he’s wearing Sam. Assuming he handed over the other ring. Which I doubt he will.” He fixes Dean with blurry, critical eyes, and his voice goes hoarse. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell us about Detroit, what happened there? Was it a _Michael_ thing? Was it Michael following his orders and making sure Sam would be right there where he was supposed to be?”

Dean swallows back his own distress at hearing his nightmare spoken out loud, feels his eyes spark with something hard and dangerous. “No. It was not a Michael thing,” he snaps. He rides the angry silence for a moment, until his heart slows and his irritation troughs, knows how it must be tearing at the old man inside, because it’s tearing at him too. “I tried to, I don’t know – give him a hint,” he says then. It’s stilted, unconvincing, he knows. “When you had me on lockdown before Van Nuys. I told him I thought they’d get to him somehow.”

Bobby stares back at him with a sort of exhausted sorrow for a second or two, before his eyes fall away. “You should have told us,” he says dully. “I would have locked your brother in the damn panic room, stopped him from going, no matter if he wanted to ride to the fuckin’ rescue.”

Dean scrubs at the back of his head, wonders if he can even put it into words, the need to shield his brother from what he saw in that future, protect him from the knowledge that he followed through on what he set in motion when he broke the last seal, his own need to believe that he could keep Sam human, to prop up what little faith he had left in his brother by shoring up Sam’s faith in himself. “How could I do that, Bobby?” he says, softer now. “How could I tell him that it happens, kill his hope like that? I needed him to come up fighting, I needed him thinking there was no fuckin’ way. Team Free Will, remember? Knowing he said yes is hardly an incentive to say no… what the fuck would be the point of holding out as long as he could if he knew he’d give in eventually?”

Bobby sets his jaw. “So you do think he’s said yes by now,” he replies, and his voice cracks.

Dean thinks back to what the Horseman said,  _it’s too late for Sam Winchester_ , and he sighs out through gritted teeth, feels tension spike behind his eyes, and even if he wants to hope he knows his own tone is verging on apathy when he replies. “I don’t know. He might still be holding out.” He grabs hold of the thought for a moment, clings on tight to it. “And if he is, I want him knowing that I’m looking for him, Bobby. Not thinking that I’ve given up already because I know he says yes in Detroit. So we need to start looking for signs, omens, figure out where he might be. So we can get him back if he’s okay.”

“Or deal with Lucifer as necessary,” Bobby says morosely.

Dean doesn’t break eye contact. “Or deal with Lucifer as necessary,” he confirms. He leans down for a boot, starts pushing his foot in, glances up and around the room. “Where is Gabriel, anyway?”

Bobby snorts. “Bailed. Castiel tore him a new one when he couldn’t fix you, and then he said he wasn’t hanging around to be turned into Satan’s splatter pattern.”

“And Castiel?” Dean glances over his shoulder at the other bed, still neatly made, Bobby’s duffel parked there. “Is he in another room? He should be in this one with us, in case he has a flashback…” He trails off into silence at the old man’s shifty gaze as Bobby slants his eyes down and gazes studiously at the floor.

“Bobby?”

“He was already pretty broken up about you,” the old man mutters. “Seemed like Crowley’s news about the virus was the last straw.”

“And?”

Bobby’s eyes wander over to the nightstand, to an empty quart bottle parked there. “As soon as we got you moved, he got into the booze,” he says. “Steamed off out of here a couple of hours ago with Crowley. Bar crawl, Crowley said.” He stops, waits, flicks his gaze up, watches Dean for a long moment. “You… uh… seem to be taking it calmer than I thought you would.”

Dean glares balefully back. “That’s because I’m saying my mantra, Bobby,” he replies frostily. “Underneath my poised exterior, I’m making a  _gargantuan fuckin’ effort_  to stay calm. As opposed to shooting lightning bolts at you from my eyes as I smite you with extreme prejudice.”

Bobby shuffles his boots on the floor. “And how’s that workin’ for you?” The old man’s voice is dubious now. “That mantra?”

“Barely,” Dean seethes. “I don’t have time for this, and I can damn well do without his hangover.” He flits his eyes pointedly to the other whiskey bottle, where it rests on Bobby’s thigh. “Is this, like, a  _pattern_  with you?” he scrapes out roughly. “You left me in Cold Oak, you let Sam walk out of here into Ruby’s arms, and you let Cas go off God knows where with a  _demon_? Crowley could do anything to him. Dammit, Bobby. God _dammit_.” He buries his face in his hands for a moment as he breathes out his anxiety, and when he glances up, Bobby’s face is crestfallen. “That was unfair,” he concedes tensely. “A lot’s been going on.”

The old man shrugs. “No. It wasn’t, not really. You’re right. I knew he was messed up. I shouldn’t have let him go. I wasn’t thinking.”

Dean pauses a beat, searches for words, concludes that the truth is the only explanation that will work. “In my little trip to the future, Castiel was a junkie,” he announces bleakly, nods in confirmation as Bobby’s eyes widen. “Drunk most of the time, stoned the rest. Grieving what he lost.”

He stops, exhales sharply, shakes his head as he kneads at his jaw. “I don’t want that for him, Bobby,” he continues then. “And if Sam is gone and anything happens to me, well – you’re all he’ll have, because he isn’t Jimmy and he can’t go back to Jimmy’s life.” He fixes his gaze on the old man’s eyes. “Listen to me,” he breathes. “He pulled me out of there. You know what I did down there, what I became… he saved me from that. You know what that means to me, and you  _damn_  well know what he means to me. I’m here because of him, and he’s like this because of me. Now, I know you have your issues with him. But you need to see past that because I need to know you’ll look out for him after this is over, not let him walk out of here and get himself in trouble or hurt because he’s alone and you’re busy drowning your own sorrows.”

The old man stares back. “You sound like you don’t expect to be here at the end of all this,” he says carefully.

Dean ignores him, leans down again, retrieves his other boot from under the bed, pulls it on. “No more liquor for him, Bobby,” he says finally, somberly. “I don’t care if you have to lock him in the panic room and slide his food under the door for the rest of his natural life. No liquor. And you’ll need to hide the meds too.”

“I’ll look out for him, Dean,” Bobby says quietly. “I promise.”

Dean nods slowly. “Okay.” He pushes up to stand. “You’ll get the rings?”

The old man nods. “I’ll get the rings.”

“The colt too. We might need it.” Dean worries his bottom lip with his teeth as he thinks for a minute. “Crowley might come in useful,” he muses. “Maybe he can brace some of his demon pals, find out where Sam might be.”

“Assuming he’s still Sam,” Bobby murmurs.

Dean sighs. “Assuming he’s still Sam.”

***

Demon chicks seem to habitually drive tiny cars, Sam thinks dazedly, from his folded up spot on the back seat, and it’s oddly familiar to be staring at the top of a head of dark hair as they rocket down route ninety so fast he thinks she might be about to make the jump into light speed. It makes him think of his first efforts at smoking out demons with Ruby, how he couldn’t quite get it up for the first few weeks and he’d wake up in exactly this position after some black-eyed bastard knocked the shit out of him before his evil hand could do its work.

He still feels tight and agonized in his chest, and his body is numb below the waist because Lucifer hurled him into the door, and the handle smashed into the small of his back as he bounced off it. His hands are resting on his belly and it feels rock hard there. Ruptured spleen, he guesses, because he’s seen enough episodes of ER to diagnose that one without a medical degree. His ears still throb and his vision is still hazy. He wants to hear his brother’s voice, feel his competent, practiced hands easing his hurts, and he groans out his discomfort.

Meg casts a quick look behind her. “There’s a bottle of water beside you,” she offers neutrally. “I loosened the cap.”

He flails about for it, levers off the cap, and he can’t move his head from where it’s wedged into the corner, so he has to lift the bottle and drip the liquid down into his mouth. The cold water shocks his smashed teeth, sends pain screeching up through the exposed nerves, and he winces. He can sense the car weaving precariously on the road, and the movement sends water splashing up into his eyes, and they flare painfully. He screws his eyes closed, can vaguely overhear her speaking low into her cellphone.

“Pick up Crowley, you bastard,” she mutters. “Only five hundred miles to go, Sammy,” she throws back then.

“D’you call Dean?” he croaks back at her.

“It went to his voicemail,” she raps out tersely. “Don’t you fucking die on me, Sam.”

And Sam is torn between thinking that isn’t such a good idea and thinking it might be the smartest thing he ever did, and his vision is tunneling, and he sinks into peaceful blackness.

***

“Pick up, you fuckin’ assbutt,” Dean mutters into the cool night breeze, Bobby’s cellphone clamped to his ear. And abruptly there’s a cacophony of noise blaring though the receiver, and a voice slurring somewhere in there.

“Castiel, where the fuck are you?” he barks savagely, and he scowls at the graveled out nonsense that feeds back to him. “On a bar crawl with Crowley, yeah, Bobby said. But where? Jesus fuckin’ Christ. Put him on. I don’t give a shit, put him on. _Now_.”

 _Mike. You’re up. How are the wings?_

“Crowley, I don’t have time for this. He’s hammered. What the fuck is that about?”

 _He was arseing around the motel room and going apeshit every time the old geezer went anywhere near you. He needed loosening up._

Dean battens down his irritation, barely. “The end of the world is nigh, and you’re saying he needs loosening up?”

 _We’re getting tanked precisely because the end of the world is nigh. And you’d be proud of him. He’s got hollow legs, and he’s fleecing them at the pool tables._

Dean goggles despite himself. “He is?”

 _Yeah, he’s a natural. And the local mingers are begging for him, I reckon he might even score. Hang on a minute… Cas! Cas! Ask if they’ve got crisps…_

Dean claws at the air with his free hand. “Where the fuck are you, Crowley?”

 _No idea, mate. Shall I ask the barkeep?_

“Please do,” he scathes out.

 _Just a sec… Oy, John-barkeep, where are we? Where? Mike, you there? We’re in some armpit called Merle’s Pour House. Uncommon fun served up with a slice of paradise. So the sign over the bar says. It’s off west forty-ninth. Hang on a sec… what, mate? Cheers. Mike, you there still? It’s behind the Tastee-Deelite Drive-Thru._

“I’m there,” he snarls. “And if you’ve laid one cloven fuckin’ hoof on him, I will cut your dick off with a plastic spoon and feed it to you whole. And I’ve had practice, believe me.”

 _Is that a threat or a promise?_

“I don’t need this right now, Crowley, so don’t even fuckin’ go there with me. If you’ve done anything—”

 _Does that include the laying on of hands?_

“Die.”

He clicks the phone closed, walks over to the truck where Bobby is waiting. “Stay frosty, huh?” he warns, as he hands the phone back to the old man. And in the whisper of a breeze he’s right where he needs to be, pushing through the doorway past a couple of lurching twenty-somethings who reel towards him with puckered, lipstick-claggy mouths as he zips adroitly out of reach and winds his way into the smoky nether reaches of the bar. And he can hear it as he walks, the tribal hoot background track to a drunken smackdown and he doesn’t even have to wonder who’s getting schooled because it’s just how their luck is going these days. He senses, rather than sees, a short, stocky body being propelled through the air about five feet from the ground, leans gracefully to the side along with the rest of the crowd as it streaks by and crashes into a table.

Crowley picks himself up, nods as he uses his thumb to wipe blood from his nose, takes off his coat and lays it carefully over the back of a chair. “You should know this isn’t my fault, Mike,” he offers diplomatically, as he starts rolling up his sleeves, and then he furrows his brow. “I mean, technically you might think it is, being as it was my idea to take him clubbing but this…” He pauses, waves a hand. “Right here and now, this particular scenario, isn’t my fault.” He grimaces. “He’s a mouthy little terrier, your boyfriend, like one of those snappy little rat dogs that grabs you by the ankle, and you have to give it a good hard kicking to—”

“I need some intel on where my brother might be, and you’re tagged,” Dean cuts in tersely. “Get on it right the fuck now.”

Crowley’s indignant chatter fades into the background as he strides in the direction the demon emerged from. He finds himself on the edge of a cleared space around the pool tables, takes it all in and folds his arms as goes through the drill, scoping the joint, scanning for the nearest exit, a spot in the crowd that isn’t so thickly populated, the escape route, projectiles, possible weapons, big rough-looking guys in the crowd who can be counted on to join in and dogpile him when the shit hits the fan.

Then he turns his gaze back to the center of the space. The guy he’s looking at is built like something from the Eastern European fuck-you school of architecture. He has mean, beady eyes, a pleased smile on his doughy face, and a raised fist as he poses for the hushed crowd, and they’re straining forwards in anticipation, camera phones held on high and clicking away faintly. Architecture guy’s other hand is around Castiel’s throat, and Castiel is flopping half on and half off the pool table, gazing up like he’s hypnotized, one of his eyes puffed closed and his nose bleeding.

Dean rolls his eyes, nudges the guy next to him, leans into his space slightly. “What did he do?” he murmurs softly. “The little guy, I mean.”

The stranger makes a face. “Nothin’, really. Him and his buddy were just having a good time, gettin’ drunk, singin’ hymns, playin’ pool.”

Dean furrows his brow. “Singing  _hymns_?”

“Yeah. Michael Row the Boat Ashore. On a loop. He gave Vern some lip when Vern asked him to can it. Used all sorts of big, fancy words. Vern got pissy about it, and the little guy twitched him.”

Jesus, Dean thinks, it can and does get worse. “Excuse me? _Twitched_  him?”

“Yeah. Like you do with a horse.”

“With a  _horse_?” And man, he doesn’t even want to know.

“Yeah, and then Vern just blew up.” The man snorts. “Vern’s got a fuckin’ temper on him, that’s for sure.”

Dean looks from Castiel up to Vern’s face, and the big man has this expression in his eyes, a sort of dumb, enthusiastic bloodlust mixed with the satisfaction of beating someone considerably smaller into a pulp. And Dean hasn’t looked really carefully at the  _people_  since Van Nuys, fuck it, he hasn’t even really seen any people but his brothers and Bobby, but in just that split second he can see right into this bastard’s heart, can see everything he’s done in his forty-four years of life, and he’s scum.

He skates his eyes across the crowd again, and that guy there is screwing his teenage daughter most nights, and that middle-aged woman over there smothered her mom with a pillow when the old lady caught her sneaking into her life savings. There’s a nice looking youngster with a protective arm around his sweetie-pie, who’s hiding bruises and cigarette burns under her sweater, and the pretty girl who’s helping tend bar is dealing crystal meth to schoolkids. And it suddenly hits him that some of these sonsofbitches don’t deserve to be saved, that maybe they’re causes of sin, and evildoers, and that he should just throw them into the furnace of fire, to weep and gnash their teeth, like Death suggested. And fuck it, he doesn’t have time for this fight but he wants it, wants to do some damage, hurt one of these vermin who aren’t chosen, the wicked, the ones who were slated to take the express elevator ride down to the basement on judgment day.

He clears his throat loudly, and his voice grates out into the quiet. “Friend. That’s my brother you have spread out on that pool table.”

The man’s fist has started its journey down but it screeches to a halt, mid-air, and he flicks an insolent eye over, looks Dean up and down. “And what are you gonna do about it, pretty boy?” he snarls.

Dean tents his eyebrows. “Extreme violence springs to mind,” he replies mildly.

Vern smiles widely, hoiks a spitball down at his victim, wipes the back of his hand across his nose. He removes the hand he’s using to pin Castiel to the green baize, and the smaller man slides gracelessly down to the floor and slumps against the leg of the pool table.

Castiel regards Dean carefully through his one good eye, and for a second it’s that melancholy, dreamy look he gets every now and then, when he stares at Dean like he hung the moon. And then an inebriated smile of joy brightens his features, until he cocks his head, gulps, and vomits prodigiously over architecture guy’s boots.

The atmosphere suddenly goes thin and oxygen-starved, as every patron clustered around the tableau breathes in sharply, and Vern looks down as Castiel looks up. “Oops,” Castiel says dryly.

And there it is, the adrenaline surge that telegraphs the imminent explosion, as the big man barks out a stream of expletives, furrows his brow so hard it corrugates, and goes puce with rage while he reaches down and picks Castiel up by the neck, shaking him like he’s a rag doll.

Dean is right there, has the bastard’s wrist in an iron grip. “Put my brother down,” he suggests politely, and just in case Vern doesn’t compute that it’s an order, he squeezes. He can feel bones grind in the man’s arm, and Vern yelps, drops Castiel, and comes back swinging.

His fist slams into Dean’s jaw, and there’s a split second when his eyes widen in awe before the pain hits and he shrieks, clutching his hand. And Dean stares up at him and mentally runs through the soft spots he has to choose from, face, kidneys, jewels, windpipe, because he’s totally going for asocial violence here, wants to hurt this fuckin’ idiot even if he does know how damned annoying Castiel can be, how he buzzes around like a skeeter that damn well needs swatting at times, and the little nerd probably had it coming. Him and his  _big fuckin’ words_.

Jewels it is, he thinks, and he steps back and buries his boot in the other man’s crotch like he’s kicking a field goal. Vern hollers out a strangled wail, doubles over, and Dean grasps a generous handful of his mullet, hauls him up and deals him a swift uppercut to the jaw, angling his body slightly so his full weight is behind his fist as it thrusts up from low down by his belly, hammering his knuckles into the bone, economical, efficient, smooth. The old-fashioned way.

Vern reels on his feet and stares at him for a long moment, before his eyes spin backwards in their sockets and he crashes to earth like a felled oak tree. Dean fancies the place shakes with the impact, and he studies the guy for a moment, doing the star position there on the floor. Then he becomes aware of the crowd murmuring behind him. He glances back over his shoulder, and they’re closing in, big guys built like Iowa barns, with low-slung gussets and their foreheads pulled low over their eyes.

He smiles. “Problem?”

And they pile in, and in the split second before the mob hits him he catches a glimpse of Crowley, off to the side and laughing wildly as he shadow boxes energetically along to the action.

When the first blow ricochets harmlessly off his jaw Dean thinks,  _you poor bastards_ , and then he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

***

Bobby pockets the rings, tosses the colt on the front seat of his truck, feeds his dog, and spends five minutes in the kitchen rustling up a bologna and cheese sandwich before heading out. He’s shuffling down towards the back door, swallowing down a mouthful, when he hears a noise. He swings around, sees the figure standing at the top end of the hallway, and he feels a thrill of hope. He squints.

“Sam?”

The man steps out of the shadows, smiles. “No, Bobby,” he says simply. “Not Sam.”

And Bobby smiles, starts walking forward. “Adam. Jesus. We thought you’d—”

Adam raises a finger, brings Bobby to a halt with the gesture, shakes his head. “Sorry, Bobby,” he says sympathetically. “Not Adam either.”

***

Brawl therapy is good for the soul, Dean thinks, as he strides towards the Impala with Castiel slung limply over his shoulder. He holds his hand out in front of him, smiles in satisfaction at his unblemished knuckles, and then snorts derisively as a low groan meanders up from hip level behind him.

“God. God have mercy. Oh my God…”

It’s followed by a snuffling, choking sound as he pitches Castiel over onto his feet and lowers him down onto his butt, before leaning him up against the wheel of the car.

“Oh my God?” Dean queries acidly. “I gotta tell you, Cas, that’s ironic.” He scowls down as Castiel peers up at him, and even though only one streetlamp casts out a halfhearted glow from ten feet away, Dean can see the other man’s one open eye is huge in a milky-pale face bruised and smudged with blood. He looks oddly small and defenseless and there’s a second when Dean marvels at the memory of certainty, determination, strength, iron-hard fists on flesh compared to this, after the fall.

“You’re better,” Castiel interrupts his train of thought, and he smiles woozily.

Dean stares down at him. “I’m better,” he agrees. “But you’re worse.”

“Was it Gabriel?”

“No. Death, actually.”

Castiel’s face turns quizzical, and he rubs at his belly. “That makes no sense,” he mumbles distractedly. And then he makes a sad, incomprehensible sound of suffering, and leans over to puke in the dirt.

Dean grimaces in distaste. “Sense or not, I got the ring. Which is all that matters.” He heaves the car door open and roots out a bottle of water from the footwell, drops it between Castiel’s outflung legs. “I don’t have time for this, Castiel,” he says curtly. “Here. Sips, or it’ll come back up.”

Castiel flails for the bottle. “I feel extremely unwell,” he announces placidly.

“That’s because you’re shit-faced.”

“And I hurt.” He sucks a mouthful of water down, swills it around and spits.

Dean stares down, feels something lurch in his gut, and maybe it’s irritation or maybe it’s the fact that he’s looking at the only good thing to have come out of this whole fucked-up mess, and now it’s frail and falling apart before his eyes, and it’s his fault. And now he can feel a tightness around his heart too, a tightness that goes with caring way more than he should, maybe even wanting, _needing_ way more than he should too. It’s feelings he doesn’t have time for, that he hasn’t even really come to terms with, a chink in his armor he can do without. He bricks it up. “You need to be more careful,” he snaps. “You know I can’t fix you without slipping even more than I did when I pulled you out of the Pit. And I can’t slip any further. I have to deal with my brother.”

Castiel bristles. “I didn’t ask or expect to be pulled from the Pit, and I’m not asking or expecting you to fix me,” he grudges out. “But given the copious amounts of alcohol you consumed after Hell, perhaps you could  _advise_  me on how to cope with the effects.”

He stares back at Dean, intense, and Dean thinks about it for a good thirty seconds before he flops down in the dirt next to the other man. He can’t help the note of amusement that creeps into his voice. “Man, you’re plumbing the depths with the sarcasm these days, Cas.”

“Well, they say it is the lowest form of wit,” Castiel retorts pissily. “And I learned it from the best.” 

“They say it’s the highest form of intelligence too,” Dean jibes back. “And yeah, you learned it from the best.” He elbows the other man then. “Try deep breaths,” he suggests, and he demonstrates. “In, out. Yeah, like that.” And then, more sympathetically now the verbal sparring is out of the way, “How’s the chest?”

Castiel floats a hand up to his forehead, leans into it heavily. “He didn’t hit me there. It’s this head. Something is wrong with it, Dean. This brain is too big for this skull. And this stomach feels as if… as if…” He can’t find the words, holds up his hand and claws his fingers together. “Like this. My last hangover wasn’t this bad.”

Dean shakes his head, exasperated. “You were you then,” he offers. “Now you’re…” He trails off, flaps a hand vaguely.

“Not me,” Castiel supplies forlornly. He pauses a beat. “What exactly am I, Dean?” he asks. “I’m not me. I’m not him either. Jimmy Novak, I mean.” He glances at Dean, with his slitty, puffy eye, and his brow creases. “Maybe you aren’t the only hybrid,” he continues moodily. “Or maybe I’m trapped in an existential crisis. My life has no meaning, purpose or value, after all.”

Dean raises an eyebrow. “Hybrid? And here I was thinking it was synergy.” He jollies his voice up to humorous. “You’re being philosophical, Cas. That’s got to be at least the fourth stage of drunk. Have you argued for or against artificial turf yet? Or been to the local tattoo parlor?” He gets a sudden mental picture of ink flowers twining around a heart,  _Crowley Forever_ , and he shudders. “Never go to a tattoo parlor while drunk and with Crowley.”

Castiel gazes at him, blank.

“Existential crisis my ass, is what I’m saying,” Dean clarifies witheringly. “You’re hammered. How much have you had?”

Castiel’s face takes on a pained expression. “I lost count after seven beers, five whiskey chasers, and a four horsemen go to hell.” He gulps weakly. “That’s a drink, by the way.”

Dean shakes his head. “I know it’s a drink, you fuckin’ idiot,” he says tightly. “Jesus. You can’t do that. You’re gonna wake up  _yellow_  tomorrow. Do you think I need this to worry about too?” He scrubs a hand over his head, palms his eyes for a moment and blows out a long, calming breath before he glares back. “What were you thinking?  _Were_  you actually thinking?”

Castiel is silent for a minute, seems mildly confused. “I  _was_ thinking, Dean,” he says then, and pensively. “I was thinking that you were dying.” He sags, starts listing over to lean heavily on Dean.

“I don’t have time for this,” Dean spits out again, and viciously too. “You need to get your head back in the game, because you’re no use to me like this. And now Sam is gone, I can’t do this without you.” But even as he says it, he’s reaching over, draping his arm around Castiel and pulling him in close and tight, because every drunk guy needs a comforting arm when he hits tired and emotional. Castiel is smaller and way slighter than Sam, but in some gut-clenching way it comforts Dean, because it makes him think of his ginormatron brother, who’s partway smashed out of his gourd after his fourth Bud, and who might destroy the world if he isn’t Sam any more.

“I was thinking that you were dying,” Castiel echoes himself, from where his head is wedged under Dean’s chin. “And that all was lost. And that Sam was lost. And that I’d see out my days as a Stepford bitch in Hell. But mostly I was thinking that you were dying.” He groans out pathetically. “I feel so sick,” he slurs. “I need pills that will take it all away, like the last time.”

Dean fists a good handful of Castiel’s hair and raises his face up, because he damn well doesn’t like the suicide-note sound of that shit. “I’m not dying, Castiel,” he says quietly. “And you aren’t having pills to take all that away. You can damn well suffer it this time, and learn from it. And if I ever hear you say anything like that again, if I even catch you taking fuckin’  _vitamins_ , so help me Cas, I will knock you into next week.” He rests the other man’s head gently on his shoulder again, his fingers still tangled in his hair, and he rubs the line of his jaw on Castiel’s brow. “Did you have all that liquor on an empty stomach?”

Castiel groans again. “Crowley shared a packet of Funyuns with me. And after the first two bars, he took me to a restaurant and fed me something called a vindaloo. He said it was a tradition in what he described as his neck of the woods, and he claimed it would put hair on my chest. I haven’t checked yet.” His voice takes on a note of tired awe. “It was like eating fire, Dean.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Moronic fuckin’ moron,” he bites out. He reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Speaking of Crowley, I need to track him down, see if he’s having any luck finding out where Sam might be.”

Castiel sniffs disconsolately. “Do you think Sam said yes?”

The question churns up the unsettled, anxious, aching feeling Dean has been trying to quash since he woke up in the motel room with the memory of the Horseman’s words resounding in his head. “Honestly, Cas, I don’t know,” he replies. “I don’t even really want to consider it.” And he stares ahead, into the darkness, and he doesn’t let himself consider it. “Will you be okay here if I go look for Crowley?”

Castiel stays where he is, slumped, and heavy, and profoundly tragic. “Probably. Though at this point I’d prefer it if you would smite me.”

Dean huffs impatiently, and then he can’t help himself. “You’re so naïve,” he marvels. “I don’t get that. Come on, Castiel… you were one of us. You’ve fought with us. You’ve fought with me,  _for_  me. You’ve been dealing down death and destruction for millennia. You’ve helped raze cities, end whole civilizations, hand down God’s wrath to sinners. You’re fuckin’ badass, you went up against Zachariah, against Raphael, against  _Lucifer_ , for crying out loud. How can that all suddenly be gone? I just, I don’t—”

Castiel pulls away and upright then, snorts derisively. “Did you even see me then, Michael? Did you see any of us? When you were our fearless leader, and you—”

“Don’t,” Dean interrupts. His voice breaks on the word, and he shoves into Castiel hard, because it shocks him, the sudden reality of what this is, or what it sounds like: the beginning of the future, the virus out there, too late for Sam Winchester, Castiel stoned and insolent, slumped in filthy jeans and boots,  _our fearless leader_. It’s like someone walked over his grave. “Don’t ever call me that, Castiel,” he grates out harshly. “ _Ever_.”

There’s an awkward moment of silence, and Castiel clears his throat. “I can take care of myself if you need to go and search for Crowley.”

And Dean just shakes his head, frustrated. “Now you do sound like Jimmy Novak,” he bitches. “Slippery little bastard that he was. And there’s no fuckin’ way you’re driving my car in that state.”

Castiel sighs, pulls up his knees, turns in towards him again.

“You’re snuggling,” Dean says balefully.

“I’m leaning,” Castiel corrects him tartly. “So I don’t fall over. And he’s gone. Jimmy. His soul left. I can’t be him.”

“So be Castiel,” Dean shoots back. “I like him much better anyway.”

Castiel heaves out an infinitely patient sigh and uses his  _I’ll-speak-slowly-and-maybe-you’ll-get-it_  voice. “There isn’t really a me, either. There isn’t really a Castiel, not without my grace. We are defined by our grace. I’m empty without it.” His tone is tired, and flat, and despondent. “You know this, Michael… I heard you tell Bobby, how it filled that space in you. Without my grace, my life has no purpose, or meaning, or value. Like I said.”

Dean rubs at his jaw, growls out his exasperation. “Come on, Cas. Is this the liquor talking?” He feels irritably paternal, feels like he sometimes does with Sam, and the thought of his brother stings him again, and he shivers, blocks it out. “Look. You’re right. I know that feeling. But you just have to fill that space with other things.”

“You filled it with family,” Castiel observes listlessly. “With Sam. I don’t have that.”

Dean keeps trying. “Maybe you could,” he hazards. “Maybe you could be like Jimmy. In the car, when you told me about Sam. What you did. For me. It helped.” He stops, suddenly uncomfortable at the memory, and he scowls at the sheer emo chickflickery of it, before he plows on regardless. “You were – I don’t know…  _caring_.” He thinks on it a few seconds. “Jimmy had a kid, didn’t he?” he muses. “In fact, you had Jimmy’s kid for a few minutes.”  _And that didn’t come out right_ , he thinks. 

“I was caring because I care about you, Dean,” Castiel says dryly. “And do you intend reaching an actual point at any time in the next few minutes? Only I need to sleep. And you said you needed to find Crowley.” His voice turns knowing then. “And you can’t hide from this situation.”

Dean wonders for a moment if he is procrastinating, if he’s putting off finding the demon and giving him the third degree because he’s afraid of what he might hear. And he concludes that might be exactly what it is, so he keeps right at it, because on balance it’s better than thinking about his brother screaming for mercy while Lucifer persuades him around to his way of thinking. “Well at least you’re too drunk for nightmares,” he says finally. “And I don’t know. I don’t know what my point is. But Jimmy – he loved his wife and kid.”

“Jimmy’s wife thought he was going crazy,” Castiel retorts sourly. “His daughter probably still has nightmares. I ripped him from them, Dean. Are you suggesting I go back to Pontiac and play house with them?” 

Dean ignores him, persists. “No, that isn’t – maybe I’m trying to say that you could have everything Jimmy had. You’re here and you aren’t a nobody. You exist. Maybe you need to just – embrace it. It could be an opportunity. Maybe you could have a life, a home, have a family, love somebody. As _Castiel_. It doesn’t have to be all about regret for what you’ve lost.” He shrugs carelessly. “I’m just saying. And anyway, Bobby says he’ll keep an eye on you. You’ll be able to room with him afterwards.”

Castiel visibly flinches, comes more alert, sits up straight again and looks right at him. His eyes are suddenly old and wise, his voice low and solemn, and it isn’t a question, it’s a bald statement. “You don’t expect to survive.” He studies Dean for a beat longer. “Or perhaps you don’t intend to.”

Dean deflects, breaks the moment. “Crowley says you’re a world class hustler.”

And Castiel’s expression drifts back to weary sadness, and he twists his mouth up into a fake grin, reaches into his hip pocket, and produces a roll of notes. “Here, have a large sum of money,” he says. “Perhaps it’ll cover the motel room, since I can’t Obi-Wan the desk clerks any more.” His face falls back into doleful resignation. “Although I suppose you can do that now.”

Dean ignores the dig, if that’s what it even was, plucks the roll of bills out of Castiel’s hand. He flicks through it, whistles admiringly. “Two hundred and eighty bucks. That’s some pretty smooth action there, Cas.”

Castiel watches him critically for a few seconds. “Yes, perhaps I can use my new skills to hustle my way across these United States hunting demons after you’re gone,” he remarks flippantly. And his lightness is as forced as his smile, because Dean can hear the strain underpinning his voice.

“Well, you’ll have to do a damn sight better in bar fights if that’s the plan,” Dean snipes. “Just because that guy was bigger doesn’t mean you couldn’t have—” And he yelps, pulled up short by the iron grip squeezing and twisting his top lip around so far he thinks it might rip off his face. Of course, he thinks, and it all makes sense now. The  _twitch_. “Where did you learn how to do that?” he snarls out thickly, around Castiel’s fingers.

“Crowley showed me,” Castiel replies gravely. “He learned it from Frank the-mad-axeman Mitchell while out drinking with Frank and a mobster named Ronnie Kray in a Bethnal Green watering hole of ill-repute in nineteen sixty five.” He smirks weakly. “So he says.”

“Man. You got a heck of a grip there, even without your mojo.”

“That’s because your lips are unusually full for a thirty-one year old male of the species, Dean. In fact, Crowley describes them as cocksu—”

“Stop. Right there.”

Castiel stops, considers, rephrases as he lets go. “What I mean to say is that there’s more to hold on to.”

Dean feels his eyebrows shoot up. “You’re damn lucky I didn’t feel that.” He shakes his head, pushes up to stand. “Will you be good there if I go see if Crowley’s hanging around, or do you want some help getting into the car?”

“I’ll sit here for a spell,” Castiel says, on a sigh. “I’m sure you don’t want me vomiting on the upholstery.”

“True, that,” Dean says. He starts walking and then he stops, turns back. “One more thing. Michael Row the Boat Ashore?”

“It was Crowley’s idea.”

Dean rolls his eyes, hovers there for a moment, because what do you know, the emo chickflick moment isn’t over after all and he has to get it off his chest, some expression of this  _thing_  he hasn’t really let himself acknowledge before, even though he knows it’s been sparking between them ever since the mess with Alastair and Castiel’s vigil at his bedside. “Cas,” he blurts out. “I don’t even know how to – I can’t, I mean… I’m not good with words. And this –  _connection_  – we have, you and me, whatever this is between us, because I’m damned if I really know… but it’s there. Maybe it always was, maybe it’s because of the Michael thing, or maybe it’s the whole Hell deal.” He falters, scratches the back of his head. “But you must  _know_. After all this time.” And what the fuck, he throws up his hands, races it out. “Your life does have meaning, purpose, and value. To  _me_.”

Castiel stares up, concentrating hard on him, and Dean can’t quite decipher the expression in the other man’s eyes but if he had to file it, he’d put it under serious. “But you won’t be here,” Castiel says then, pointedly. “And I can’t do this without you.” He looks down and away, and his voice goes quieter. “I already love somebody, Dean.”

Okay, can of worms well and truly opened, and the weight of the words is suddenly, brutally intimate, even if they give Dean an odd, content feeling in his gut. “Let’s keep some optimism going here,” he replies awkwardly. “I don’t really know where this is going. I’m not discounting any possibilities, I’m just being realistic. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that—”

Tinny noise blares out abruptly, and it’s almost a relief until Dean realizes what it is, and Castiel jumps out of his skin, eyes going wild as he starts fumbling in the pocket of the hoodie he’s still wearing. He pulls out his cellphone, presses it to his ear. He frowns, holds the phone up.

“It’s for you. Crowley.”

Dean gapes. “You changed my fuckin’ ringtone to the _Macarena_?”

Castiel blinks cautiously. “It was Crowley’s idea…”

Dean purses his lips, snatches the phone up resentfully. “Where are you?” he barks. “What do you mean where am I? Where you left the car, where do you think?  _Who_? Why would she be calling me—Crowley? You’re breaking up. _Crowley_? Fuck.” He glares at the phone, flicks a hot laser-vision glance down at Castiel. “What did I tell you about checking messages?”

He spins as a voice hails him from the darkness. Crowley, chipper as ever, and he’s giving off tells right, left and center as he trots up to them, radiating excitement, grinning whitely, eyes gleaming with satisfaction.

He pulls up short, winces as he looks down at Castiel. “Ouch,” he commiserates. “I’d drop by the butcher’s if I were you, Cas. A nice strip of beef steak should take care of that shiner.”

Castiel makes a desperate, strangled, groaning noise, slaps a hand to his belly, and Dean half turns, exasperated. “Deep breaths,” he urges again.

Crowley furrows his brow, puzzled. “Was it something I said?”

“He’s a vegetarian,” Dean snaps.

“Oops.” Crowley smirks. “I love a good chunk of steak myself.” He leans down, raises his voice. “I like my cowmeat rare, Cas. So rare it drips blood. Just cut off its head and wipe its arse, and I’m good to go.”

Castiel tips slowly over into a fetal position and retches dryly as Dean stares fixedly down at the demon. “You said you had some news,” he remarks icily.

Crowley’s face splits in a devious smile. “Lifetime immunity, Mike,” he snakes out, and he waggles his eyebrows.

Dean scowls. “This had better be good, Crowley.”

The demon chuckles. “Oh, it’s good, Mike. In fact, it’s a blinder.”

It’s all Dean can do to stop himself from burning the smug little douche out right there and then. But, “Lifetime immunity,” he agrees grudgingly.

Crowley leans in closer. “The Cozy Nights Motel, Waterloo, Iowa.” He nods for emphasis. “Your little Sammy busted out of jail.”

***

Bobby is sitting on the porch swing, rigid and scarcely breathing, when he sees the car turn in off the road and roll slowly up the dirt track, and he thinks  _smart boy_ , because Dean is being damned careful, scoping the lay of the land first. “What are you going to do?” he forces out through gritted teeth.

Lucifer hovers inside the doorway, speaks airily and almost fondly. “Oh, we’ll see. It all depends on how cooperative he is, Bobby. To be brutally honest…” He pauses, considers. “And believe me, I’m always brutally honest – I think my brother needs some help to put his control issues behind him.”

Bobby swallows thickly. “It won’t be a fair fight,” he whispers, makes his fear sound as genuine as he can, and God knows, he doesn’t have to try too hard. “He’s, uh… hurt real bad,” he lies.

Lucifer  _tsks_. “So I see from his mode of transport. Perhaps Pestilence did me a favor after all.” He reaches around the doorjamb, places a firm hand on Bobby’s shoulder, grips it for a few seconds. “Try not to worry,” he says softly, sympathetically. “I’d hate for the stress to get your blood pressure up.”

Bobby bites down hard on his lip, and his terror is all mixed up with the elation that his boy said no, that he hung on, even if he doesn’t know quite what that means for Sam yet. But Jesus, he’s about to witness the prize fight to end them all, because the devil is about to find out his brother is back to his turbo-charged self, and right after that he’s getting his tail shoved up his ass pointed end first if he doesn’t get the hell out of Dodge the second he realizes what he’s dealing with. And Bobby’s counting on that, because he he’s smack bang in the line of fire, and behind enemy positions.

“I really appreciate your help with this, Bobby,” Lucifer croons, and he pats Bobby gently before withdrawing his hand. “I need to… hammer this out with Michael. Bring him around to my point of view.” His voice goes regretful. “But you see, he’s got a hair trigger, always has had. So getting him here now, like this, when he’s hurt, well… that helps me. It gives me more options when it comes to convincing him that I’m right. And there’s just no way I could have done this without you. So I’m honestly thankful that you were open about all of this, and that you didn’t leave anything out.”

Bobby clears his throat. “And what if he isn’t convinced?” His hand is resting on his thigh, and he walks it up to his pocket, can feel the hard outline of the rings tucked down inside it. _We don’t have them all_ , he thinks.

Lucifer huffs out thoughtfully. “Well, I’m not going to lie to you Bobby. It could get messy.” He chuckles. “Maybe we should paint you white to deflect the blast.” He taps down on Bobby’s shoulder again. “Here he comes now,” he warns. “Try not to look suspicious, huh? Remember what I told you about that. We’re getting along so well, Bobby, and I’d hate for that to change.”

The Impala is grinding to a halt about fifteen feet away, and the driver debarks, slams the car door, and Bobby doubletakes, because the figure is smaller and slighter in the dark than he expected, and a sick realization starts to take hold just before Castiel emerges from the darkness.

He gazes owlishly at Bobby as he starts walking towards the porch steps, dragging weary feet through the dirt. “I thought you were a mechanic, Bobby,” he complains irritably. “Has the end of the world robbed you of the ability to repair your truck?”

Bobby gapes. “What are you doing here?”

Castiel stops, throws up his hands cluelessly. “You left a voicemail message saying your truck wouldn’t start and you needed a ride.”

Bobby fumbles for words. “But it… it was… I used – _codeword_ , I used a  _codeword_.” And then he remembers, and he closes his eyes. “Jesus,” he mutters. “Dean gave you his phone.” 

The other man starts trudging along again, snorts. “Yes. And I don’t know any of your codewords, Bobby. In fact, maybe you need to tell me what they are, because—”

“Get back in the car,” Bobby cuts in hoarsely, and his legs are like jelly as he starts to push up from the porch swing. “Get back in the car and get away from here, do it now.”

Castiel is just coming up the steps, his expression switching to puzzled, and Bobby can see he’s pale, sporting a bruised, swollen eye, and he knows it’s too late when he sees the good eye drift past him, sees the expression of surprise. “Adam Winchester? Is that Adam Winchester? Bobby, why didn’t you—”

His voice is choked off then, and he flies violently back into the porch frame, the back of his skull impacting on the wood with a dull thud. He slides down onto his butt, blinks in confusion, and peers at them vaguely. “I think I hit my head, Bobby,” he says childishly.

Lucifer moves past Bobby, squats down and tips Castiel’s face up, fingers gentle under his chin. “Castiel,” he breathes out like velvet. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

He glances back to Bobby, smiles thinly. “Don’t panic, Bobby,” he says reassuringly. “I don’t blame you for this. It doesn’t have to get in the way of our working relationship. If we can’t come up with a way to get my brother here, I’m happy to go to him. And I’m sure Castiel will be able to remember exactly where Michael is once I jog his memory.”

“What are you going to do to him?” Bobby croaks.

Lucifer winks. “Oh, I’ll think of something. I have a vast repertoire to draw from, after all.”

Bobby shakes his head, rapid, blurts it out and hears his voice go high and desperate. “No. Leave him. It’s a mistake, he isn’t supposed to be here. Me, me first.”

The devil pushes to his feet, cocks his head, and his brow creases in consternation. “Calm down, Bobby,” he says. “I don’t want you stroking out on me or anything. At least not before we’ve had the chance to discuss your codeword policy. Don’t worry, we’ll do that after I’ve had my little debrief session with Castiel here.” He sinks his boot into Castiel’s thigh, along to a muffled yelp. “Oh, ignore him,” he says at Bobby’s look. “The little runt’s tougher than he looks.”

He bends down, heaves Castiel up and over his shoulder, and this time when he smiles, it’s like he’s baring his teeth. “I seem to remember you have a soundproof room, Bobby,” he says and he motions his head at the door. “Lead the way.”

***

She’s hovering outside the motel room, smoking a cigarette, and the rain has her hair plastered flat to her skull. He can see her startle as he appears right there, and she backs away a few steps, and her eyes go wide in wonder. “So it’s true,” she murmurs. “I didn’t know whether to believe it or not.” She cackles out laughter. “I can’t believe I had my tongue in a real live archangel’s mouth.”

Dean cocks his head. “Turn-on, huh?”

She sidles closer, licks her lips. “Maybe we should crank it up a gear, the room is booked for the—”

“Enjoy Vatican City, Meg,” he cuts in dismissively. “I hear the Pope’s a real nice guy when you get to know him. But watch out for all the holy water and the praying.”

Her face screws itself into a rictus of rage and horror. “You wouldn’t,” she hisses. “I made a deal with Sam, my safe passage—”

He snaps his fingers, and now he’s staring at nothing. “Oh yes I would,” he says. “And don’t worry, you’ll get there safely.”

He pushes the door open, sees his brother sprawled across the bed. And he can’t move for a moment, his boots feel like lead, and he can see the damage from ten feet away, and his heart skitters hectically in his chest. “Jesus, Sammy,” he mutters, as he approaches.

He sits, shakes his head at the mess, feels his eyes sting, because his brother is a wrecked, battered approximation of what he used to be, face welted and raw, nose pulped, lips mashed and torn, hair matted with blood, and one of his arms is lying at an angle Dean doesn’t think he’s seen since fifth-grade geometry. It hurts him in his heart, and he reaches his hand, ready to do his thing and set this right.

And Sam’s eyes crack open, and he stares up at Dean, and Dean is gazing right back down and he can see disbelief, relief, joy, and he nods. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he whispers. “I’m fine. I got you now…” And then he trails off, because Sam’s eyes are flaring wider, alarmed, and he starts stuttering out words so faintly Dean can barely hear, until he leans close, and he barely gets the jist of it at first, but when he does it turns him cold inside.  _Shit. Bobby_.  _The rings._

His brother’s lips are still moving, and Dean puts his fingertips there to hush him, rests his palm on Sam’s cheek, and Sam shudders and leans into it. “Sssshhh,” Dean soothes. “It’ll be okay. I’m gonna fix this, Sam – Jesus. What the fuck did they do to your teeth… get you fixed up, kiddo, and then we’ll go get Bobby…”

Sam’s eyes go frantic again, and his whole frame is shaking where Dean’s thigh is pressed up against it. “No… fix,” he mumbles out brokenly. “Anna… had right idea.” He nods just barely. “Scatter me. Problem… solved…  _peace_ …”

Caught on his back foot, Dean studies his brother for a long moment. “You can’t ever say yes to him if you’re dead,” he breathes.

Sam smiles, sighs out relief, and his eyes drift closed, his whole body relaxes, and he waits.

And Dean feels anguish, pain, regret, sorrow. “I’m sorry, Sammy,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.” And he touches his fingers to his brother’s brow and lets the power streak out of him.

***

They don’t get as far as the panic room, because Lucifer is nothing if not keen. He leans Castiel up against the wall at the foot of the stairs. “Where to start?” he muses, and Bobby doesn’t understand until he hears a dry crack, and Castiel makes a stifled noise of distress, his whole frame locking rigid for a few seconds. Lucifer turns around to flash a smile. “Fingers first,” he says. “Those hands make work for idle devils.”

Bobby can hear Castiel’s breath sobbing out, and he tries not to look, holds Lucifer’s gaze instead. “Please,” he says softly. “Let him be. He can’t tell you where Michael is. He doesn’t know.”

Lucifer studies him for a second and then his eyes track down to something parked in the hallway. “Is that a toolbox, Bobby?” he asks, and his face lights up suddenly. “That’s right, you’re a mechanic… you must have a welding torch or a soldering iron… wirecutters, a drill maybe?” He raises an eyebrow, pauses a beat, before he throws back his head and brays out laughter. “I’m being facetious,” he says witheringly, once he’s calm. “Don’t be so humorless. Anyway, I don’t need props.” Then he frowns. “That said, a soldering iron would be handy.”  

It’s a little like ’Nam, Bobby thinks abstractly, twenty minutes later. But he supposes it can’t be as bad as Hell, even with the acrid smell of burnt flesh prickling his nostrils, because Castiel isn’t making the kind of noises he said he did when he was there. In fact he’s quiet, stoic, in between small gasps of effort and suffering, and he gazes over Lucifer’s shoulder and straight at Bobby with sad eyes that tell him just how effective enhanced interrogation tactics can be.

“Where is Michael?” Lucifer rages as he works.

“No…”

It’s the only reply Castiel ever gives, and it starts out clear, and firm, and heartfelt, but it dwindles to a whisper and finally a dignified silence and sheer endurance, as the devil ramps it up to a savage assault and battery that has Bobby sweating, shaking, and dry-retching behind his hand. 

“You’re no use to my brother,” Lucifer gloats, as he metes out his wrath. “You threw your grace away for him and now you’re no use to him. Do you think he can love you? You’re nothing but a burden, one more drain on his resources, one more _human_. And there are plenty of those already.”

Castiel is still obstinately quiet as Lucifer finally loses patience, and when he lands on the floor beside Bobby, a bloody and burnt bag of broken bones clad in shredded clothes, his eyes are glazed and vacant, tears are tracking his cheeks, and his teeth are chattering out his shock. His hand is flung out carelessly, smashed fingers puffy and twitching, and Bobby dares to gather it loosely in his own and hopes the comfort of touch reaches the younger man.

Lucifer scowls at Bobby. “You’re judging me,” he snaps belligerently. “But you have to understand that he sinned. He took our Father’s precious gift and rejected it. And he didn’t even know who he was doing it for… he debased himself for love of his mudmonkey. It’s just so wrong.”

And Jesus, he knows he’s signing his own death warrant, but Bobby can’t stand it any more, and he shuffles out of his corner and in front of Castiel, while the devil rocks on his heels and preens. “Leave him now,” Bobby stutters out. “Please. He doesn’t know. Let him be.”

Lucifer rolls his eyes bitterly. “You’ll never understand.”

Bobby raises a placating hand, and it’s shaking so badly he can feel the tremors jar up his arm and across his shoulders. “I get it, I do,” he races out. “It’s…” He searches his memory, desperate. “Immoral. Iniquity. What he did. But – thou shalt not kill.”

The devil goggles down at him, snorts. “You’re quoting the sixth commandment at me? That’s so utterly prosaic. And anyway, this isn’t killing.” His tone is lofty, superior. “It’s cleansing. I’m cleansing him. Sanitizing him.” He flaps a hand fluidly, and Bobby finds himself briefly airborne before he crashes down on the bedframe and sees stars for a second or two. He shakes his head, focuses dazedly on where Lucifer is reaching down to Castiel again, and then he feels wind blast his face so unexpectedly he has to close his eyes so they don’t dry up in their sockets. He hears the voice before he sees who it is.

“Lucy… I’m home.”

Bobby cracks his eyes open again, sees the short, wiry figure edging his way past and around, motioning with his sword.

“Put him down, Lu, I think you’ve made your point,” Gabriel says acidly. “There’s kill, and then there’s overkill. He isn’t going to tell you where Michael is. He made his choice a long time ago.”

Lucifer straightens, and Bobby can see emotions playing across his face, surprise, incomprehension, annoyance. “Come on,” he says finally, and he’s aghast. “I knew you were slumming, Gabriel, but for  _this_ thing? He’s meaningless, unimportant. He’s human. A cockroach. He needs to be dealt with, like they all do.”

Gabriel shrugs, swaggers forward a few steps, away from Bobby. “What can I say, Lu?” he retorts. “He had the guts to stand up to Zachariah and try to stop this mess. Which is something I should have done. And I like him. And you’re just damned nasty.”

Lucifer drops Castiel, and his head bounces off the floor. “I can’t even bring myself to fight you for him, Gabriel,” he says coldly. “And watch your tone, little brother.”

He stalks away, and Bobby’s on all-fours right then and there, crabbing back over to the unconscious man, scooping him up and heaving him out of the way. He can dimly hear the angels conversing, their voices muffled by his worry, as he shuffles backwards on his ass, plants his back up against the wall and cradles Castiel tightly in his arms like he’s one of his boys. The younger man is limp and heavy, and when Bobby pulls one of his half-closed eyes open, his pupils are fixed and dilated. He leans in closer with his cheek fractionally above Castiel’s mouth and hopes for the faint puff of air that signals life, straightens up when he doesn’t feel it, and pats his face. “Come on,” he whispers frantically. “Don’t do this, son. Please don’t do this.”

A shadow falls over them, Gabriel, still tense and coiled for action, and he doesn’t take his eye off the other archangel as he squats down beside Bobby. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “It’s only by chance I stopped by. If I’d known…”

“He isn’t breathing,” Bobby chokes out raggedly.

Gabriel smiles, shakes his head. “Oh ye of little faith,” he chides, and he taps Castiel on the forehead.

Castiel comes back with a cry, flails out in his panic and almost sucker-punches Bobby in the eye. He struggles wildly for a few seconds in the confines of Bobby’s bear hug, while Bobby speaks a stream of soothing nonsense in his ear, until he realizes where he is. He falls completely still against Bobby’s chest then, staring up at Gabriel, heaving out each breath. And then Bobby sees him flash his eyes to Lucifer and back to Gabriel again, a silent, measured appraisal of both of them, and his expression goes set and intense.

Gabriel stares down at him, and his own look is complicated, until his eyes soften and he smiles. “Not so untouchable after all,” he murmurs. “You’re the best of us, Castiel. You always were. Godspeed, brother.”

Bobby doesn’t know what the hell is being transmitted in those eyeball messages, but Castiel clears his throat, and his tone is utterly flat, and remote.

“Bobby. We need to leave. Now.”

***

Bobby hits the dirt running, a few feet behind Castiel, and he doesn’t see quite what happens but the other man smacks into something and Bobby slams right into the back of him so that they end up on their bellies in the dust, a tangle of waving limbs.

Castiel is wriggling out from under him, muttering a stream of vicious, barbed Enochian that can only be cusswords, and Bobby rolls over to see Dean sprinting up the porch steps and in through the door, as blinding white light explodes out of every orifice in his house, doorway, windows, chimney stacks, attic vents, cracks in the brick that he never even knew existed. It sears through his eyelids and it burns so hot he thinks it might have welded his eyes closed, and a hand grabs him by his shirt collar, crashes him down to the ground onto his face.

“Close your eyes,” Castiel is hollering, over an earsplitting whine that feels like a needle piercing Bobby’s eardrums. “Don’t look at him.”

The noise builds to a crescendo, cuts off abruptly then, and it’s still and dark again when Bobby cracks his eyes. They’re sore and weeping, and he groans.

“Can you see?” Castiel is on his knees next him, hauling him up, cupping his face, and his thumbs brush Bobby’s cheekbones as he squints in close. “Bobby, did you look at him?” he demands urgently. “Can you see?”

His voice is muffled by the ringing in Bobby’s ears, but he reaches up, grips Castiel’s wrists dazedly. “I closed them,” he says breathlessly. “I can see.”

Castiel nods, huffs out relief, releases him and stands, and then he turns and looks at the house for a long moment.

Bobby pulls up the corner of his shirt, uses it to wipe the tears oozing from his eyes. “Was that Lucifer?” he croaks in wonder. “Was that – did Gabriel kill him? Is it over?”

Castiel wraps his arms around himself, hugs himself tightly, as if he’s cold. “It wasn’t Lucifer,” he says quietly, and he starts back towards the porch, stumbling slightly.

Bobby scratches his head. “Wait a minute, what – shouldn’t we clear out of here, then? And what about Dean? Is he—”

“Lucifer isn’t in there any more,” Castiel throws back over his shoulder, as he disappears through the doorway, and his tone is bleak. “He’s running from Michael.”

He hasn’t a damn clue what this really is or what just went down, but Bobby pushes upright, trails along in the other man’s wake.

When he gets inside it looks like a hurricane just ripped through his house. It’s a trail of smashed wood and crumbled brick, a debris field that ends with a slight, solitary figure, head hanging and shoulders slumped, staring down at the twisted body, its wings burnt black like charcoal into the floor.

***

The weather is turning before they’re a mile out from the lot,the moonlit sky taking on a sickly greenish cast, with thick cloud rolling in from the east. Rain flurries at the windshield and when he glances off the road and out into the country, Bobby can just about see the treetops dancing wildly. He tells himself the weather just took a turn for the worse, but the sense of foreboding sits in his gut like a lead brick.

Castiel is still and silent, and when Bobby slants his eyes over he can see the younger man is staring into space, unblinking, hugging himself much as he was back at the house.

He can use the distraction, so Bobby puts it out there even though the answer is plain to see. “You okay?” No reply. “Castiel. Cas. Hey.” He reaches out, pats the other man’s leg, and he flinches himself when Castiel cries out, jumps like a scalded cat and slams himself back against the door, away from Bobby. He’s whitefaced as he clears his throat.

“My apologies,” he says breathlessly. “You startled me.”

“Are you okay?” Bobby repeats. “I mean – Gabriel did fix you, right? All the broken parts?”

Castiel studies him for a moment before he huffs out a hollow laugh. “All the broken parts,” he echoes.

Even though it isn’t really an answer, Bobby thinks maybe it’s an answer. “Look. You know that was all a vast fuckin’ snafu, don’t you, boy?” he ventures quietly. “I was expecting Dean to show up and scare him off. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Castiel sags back against the upholstery, newly composed. “That seems to be the story of my life,” he concedes matter-of-factly. “But don’t concern yourself, Bobby. I’ve had worse. More so than you can possibly conceive.”

Bobby is confused for a split second, but then he wonders how he could have forgotten. “You mean in the Pit,” he says.

Castiel’s jaw tightens, and he seems to be considering his reply for a moment. “Not just in the Pit,” he says finally.

It’s brutally succinct, a simple sentence laying out the cold, hard reality of the bible school ass-reaming Bobby remembers Dean bitching about, and the other man’s sudden, unnatural calm has Bobby narrowing his eyes. “You do know what that monster said back there was for effect, don’t you?” he says. “You ever hear the term  _psych_? He said it to mess with you.”

Castiel’s lips turn up slightly at the corners “And yet it was accurate,” he shoots back promptly. “To all intents and purposes.”

It’s too smooth, too automatic, confirms Bobby’s suspicions right off the bat, and he purses his lips. “You need to stop brooding over that crap right now, boy, because that’s exactly what it was. Crap.”

Castiel doesn’t answer, and they fall into a silence that isn’t entirely comfortable for a few minutes, as Bobby squints at the road ahead. “This weather’s for shit,” he grouses eventually, when the weight of the lull gets to be too much. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

“It’s Michael,” Castiel replies somberly. “His wrath. We need to seek shelter.”

Bobby swallows, his throat suddenly dry. “Dean told me we weren’t going to burn, but that was before Gabriel,” he says. “What do you think he’ll do?”

“It’s difficult to tell.”

The other man is still infuriatingly poised, serene to the point of indifference even, and Bobby scowls across at him. “That isn’t very reassuring.”

Castiel shrugs. “He’s… displeased. I imagine he’ll either attempt to subdue Lucifer so we can try to use the rings, assuming we retrieve the fourth one, or…” He stops abruptly, lifts his hand, points at the road ahead, barely lit by the feeble glow of the headlights. “Watch out for that—”

The truck bumps over something solid.

“—raccoon.”

Bobby snorts. “Plenty of those left. Or what?”

Castiel sighs out, resigned. “Or destroy Lucifer and begin the end. My brother may be conflicted, but that is still his guiding principle and he may have no choice if he’s placed on the defensive. Lucifer won’t go easily.”

Bobby changes tack. “If Lucifer is in Adam, then he isn’t in Sam,” he observes. “That’s good isn’t it? Means he’s weaker. Means we can get Sam back, maybe. Get the other ring, give Dean a better chance of caging Lucifer again without having to kill him.”

Castiel nods. “Crowley gave Dean a lead, news of Sam, but I don’t know if it led anywhere. He left rather abruptly.” He reaches up, pinches the bridge of his nose. “That’s when I checked messages.” He presses his hand over his eyes, makes a barely discernible noise, an inarticulate lament so faint Bobby thinks he might not realize the sound even passed his lips.

“Son,” Bobby tries again. “Are you handling this?”

Castiel puts his hand down on his thigh, the movement slow and precise. “Like he said, I’m tougher than I look,” he says neutrally. “Like I said, I’ve had worse. Much worse.” And after a few seconds, he starts rhythmically tapping his fingers on his leg, and Bobby’s seen that before, seen Dean do it to hide the fact his hands are shaking. “But my head aches,” Castiel concedes. “Do you have pills I can take for that?”

Bobby shoots him a dubious look. “No, I don’t have pills for that,” he says carefully.

Castiel is focusing ahead, at the road. “Crowley told me that the hair of the dog that bit you can often help,” he remarks casually. “I believe he was referring to liquor. Do you have any?”

“No,” Bobby says firmly. “I don’t.” He jabs out through the windshield with a finger. “It’s the weather,” he suggests. “A storm’s coming.”

The other man huffs out derisively. “That’s an understatement if I ever heard one.”

Bobby frowns. “I mean barometric pressure,” he supplies. “Changes in pressure cause changes in oxygen levels. They say blood vessels in your head expand or contract to compensate, and boom. Headache. And when the storm breaks the headache goes. Or something like that. And no, I can’t believe I’m talking about the damn weather at a time like this.”

They settle back into silence and it’s less tense this time, but Castiel keeps tapping, ramps the pace up to frantic before Bobby sees him in his peripheral vision, dropping his eyes down as if he only just realized what he’s doing. He presses his palms together surreptitiously, and slides his hands down into the crease between his thighs.

“You need to stop thinking about it, son,” Bobby reminds him gently. “You let that fester and it’ll—”

“I’m not anyone’s  _son_ ,” Castiel cuts in tersely. “Not really.” He shakes his head slowly, bites his lip, keeps looking down, and falls mute again. “I’ve existed for tens of thousands of years,” he murmurs distantly, a few miles closer to town. “And I was infinite, without beginning or end, and without limits or boundaries. But now I’m mortal. And –  _reduced_. And I was not shaped for this. And I’m afraid. And no, I’m not handling it.”

Bobby grinds the truck to a halt on the verge, turns and looks at the other man, and maybe it’s the first time he’s ever really looked, and he sees dull, shadowed eyes, pallid skin, and the kid could really use a shave. He nods slowly. “Okay. This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to stick with me if anything happens to…” He stops, self-edits. “If this doesn’t go how we want it to. That clear? I can always use some help around the lot. I can show you the business. And if you take off by yourself, I will hunt you down.” He pauses for another beat. “And I’m sorry. About your brother. About all of it. You got that?”

Castiel glances across at him and smiles weakly. “I got that.”

***

Michael has the advantage of surprise in that his brother clearly wasn’t expecting him to come barreling into Bobby’s in one piece and healthy.

Lucifer is streaking ahead of him, in defense mode, denying him a shot, and even though Michael knows his brother’s primary goal is to escape, he knows that if Lucifer can convert to a dominant position he will. And Lucifer is trying now, weaving and rolling, diving aggressively, trying to force him to overshoot, and he’s damned careful not to even as he accelerates to catch up, because he’s the attacker in this dogfight, his brother is his central point, and there’s no way he’s flying out in front and losing his tactical advantage.

It’s freezing cold at this altitude, and as thrilling as before but in a different way because now it isn’t the novelty and joy of flight after so very many years spent earthbound. Now it’s about tactics, and about testing himself. Now it’s the geometry of pursuit, it’s the physics of managing his energy-to-weight ratio and limiting the disadvantages of drag and gravity so he can conserve his own strength, it’s violent acrobatic maneuvering in order to gain a better angular position in relation to his brother. And under the fundamentals of aerodynamics, and basic fighting strategies, it’s bloodlust, and grim, silent intent, fueled by grief and rage at the sight of his fallen brother, who chose sides and died for it.

Michael soars through icy blackness as Lucifer pitches, and then he banks into a slice turn and bullets down, a pure pursuit curve that puts him on a collision course with his brother. Their flight paths merge, and he rams into Lucifer, throws him off course and is sent spinning wildly himself, striving to regain his offensive position.

Lucifer smashes into him from out of nowhere, and he’s laughing. “You caught me unawares, Michael,” his brother whispers in his ear, from behind, and Lucifer spoons him close, snakes a leg around his, wraps an arm around his neck, rests his chin right there on his shoulder. “I didn’t expect to find you quite so well and energetic…”

Michael whirls. “It’s inconvenient for you,” he accedes dryly, as he flings his brother away, and Lucifer spirals into a bright dot in the distance before flashing back right in front of him.

“It doesn’t have to be,” Lucifer replies, on a sigh, and his eyes go sorrowful as he reaches out a placating hand. “I don’t want to harm you, brother. We can work together. Your grunt is useless now he’s human, and Sam… well, Sam knows everything now. I’m all that’s left to you, and you know the Earth dies screaming whether you destroy me or not. It doesn’t have to end badly for us too. Join me. We can share.”

“You talk too much,” Michael hisses, and he lunges, singleminded, feels his blade make contact, hears the rumble of thunder and feels the pop of static hiss through his nerve endings as he stabs into Lucifer’s grace and then skims past his brother while pure white radiance explodes out of him, bathing Michael in its glow. He pivots around, can see his brother’s eyes spark molten fury now as Lucifer comes at him, feels the burn of Lucifer’s sword as it bisects his own middle, and the air blazes bright again, and this time it’s his own essence that glitters its distress.

He chokes back a cry, disengages, full-thrusts into a zoom climb that’s faster than the speed of light, before he curves in a tight radius and dives into a cloud to hide as he sends a blast of power out ahead, leading his target. And he guessed with microscopic accuracy, sees his brother fly right into where he flung his mojo as he emerges from cobweb mists, and the shockwave buffets Lucifer and sends him tailspinning.

Michael screeches to a halt, hangs there in the sky for a second of unmitigated horror,  _brother_ , and then Lucifer slams into him from behind, sends him plummeting with the impact. He can see his brother above him as he tumbles to earth, and he knows how losing altitude can be fatal, knows that being higher is having the advantage, and he rights himself and climbs as Lucifer rockets towards him. And now it’s all about who can turn the fastest without losing speed, who can turn the tightest, who can stay inside the other.

Michael breaks left, across his brother’s trajectory, and Lucifer executes a skillful barrel roll, a ninety degree turn that brings him right back in line with Michael’s course. And then Lucifer is on him and they fence in thin air, parrying, cutting, slashing at each other, taking evasive action and dancing back before advancing again. Thunder claps and electricity illuminates the sky as their blades clash, pinprick sparks erupt each time they make contact with skin, dazzling light strobing wildly when the metal bites deeper, and the silence of the void is broken by gasps and grunts of effort. It’s rapid, aggressive, it’s vicious close-quarters combat, it’s gutter fighting, brutal, it’s razor sharp edges slicing though skin and muscle, fists landing home, it’s bones grinding and cracking, it’s grunts of pain and effort with every blow, the precise application of near-lethal force.

And it’s Lucifer gripping Michael’s face between his hands, and his brother stares at him with brilliant eyes and gleams bloody teeth in a delighted smile. “You aren’t closing this out, Michael,” he mocks. “You’re pulling your punches. You love me and you know I love you, brother. You won’t kill me… you can’t, because you don’t want to. Now watch me lay this world to waste, because I win either way.”

He leans in, ghosts his lips against Michael’s, and then he whirls and disengages in a steep, straight plunge, accelerating so fast Michael loses track of him for a second.

“Don’t be so sure,” he murmurs, before he steels himself and sets off in pursuit.

***

Echoing, crashing noises from outside wake Sam, and he’s staring up at a nicotine-yellowed ceiling stained with watermarks, and all he can think is about is Dean’s eyes, liquid with grief, as his brother gazed down at him, and all he can feel is hollow, numb dread at the fact he’s alive.

He rolls off the bed, stumbles exhaustedly to the window, peers out into a nondescript parking lot. It’s almost pitch black outside, no lights of any kind, and the wind is howling, hail bouncing off the glass as if someone is throwing handfuls of pebbles at the window to attract his attention.

His mouth feels cottony, tastes coppery, and he gags, lurches to the bathroom and drools pink-stained saliva into the sink. He turns on the faucet with a shaking hand, splashes his face with water, sloshes palmfuls into his mouth, swirls it around in there and spits. He presses careful fingers on his face, feels it whole and intact, straightens up and cracks his eyes cautiously, a millimeter at a time, scared of what might see. He gulps as he gazes at skin unmarked and healthy, nose straight, and even the shadows under his eyes are gone.

He’s leaning into the bathroom mirror, examining his front teeth, gripping their pearly white perfection between thumb and forefinger and seeing if they wiggle, when the door to the motel room flies open. He leans back to find himself staring at Bobby and Castiel, jointly wrestling the door closed as horizontal rain streaks into the room.

He twists and steps out into the room, shouts to be heard over the dull roar of the weather outside. “Where’s D—” he starts, and pulls up short as Bobby strides over and throws his arms around him in a silent embrace so tight he can barely breathe. The perks of being alive, he thinks, but he doesn’t know if it makes things any better.

Castiel hovers by the closed door, soaked, gray-faced, and awkward. “It’s good to see you, Sam,” he says quietly. “We feared the worst.”

Sam swallows. “I was – tempted. It was like you said it would be.” He holds Castiel’s gaze over Bobby’s shoulder for a long moment. “I remembered,” he says. “What you said to me outside Nivaeus. I remembered that, when it mattered most. Thank you.”

The other man nods just barely. “You did well, Sam.”

Bobby steps back, and he’s pink-eyed with emotion, and the lines around his eyes are carved deeper with stress. “I’m sorry, son,” he says softly. “About Adam.”

Sam scrubs a hand through his hair. “He showed up?”

Bobby grimaces. “And then some.”

“Jesus, Bobby, I’m so sorry,” Sam babbles out. “He – I had no idea. He was there with me, wherever they took us after Detroit, and I told him to head for your place if we got out. It didn’t even occur to me that he might – that it might be him.”

Bobby shakes his head, sits down heavily on the bed. “I was pretty taken aback myself.” The old man throws a meaningful glance back at Castiel. “Fortunately for me, he was distracted.” He leans down and hauls his duffel out from under the bed, fishes out a bottle. “I need a goddamn drink. And then we need to get out of here.”

Sam tracks from one man to the other. “Distracted by what?” he asks, and he sees a flash of utter horror drain what little color there is in Castiel’s face, leaving his pallor even more obvious. “Is that where Dean went?” Sam guesses. “To the lot? I remember him leaning over me after Meg broke me out of there, I remember telling him—”

“Please tell me Meg isn’t a member of Team Free Will now,” Castiel gravels out wearily. “It’s bad enough that we have Crowley tagging along.” He plants his butt on the bed beside Bobby and holds his hand out for the bottle.

Bobby snorts, raises a hand to grip the scruff of Castiel’s neck, shakes him lightly. “Don’t even think it, boy. You’re on the wagon.” He caps the bottle, tucks it back inside his bag.

Castiel furrows his brow, puzzled. “I don’t see a wagon anywhere.”

Bobby rolls his eyes, turns his attention back to Sam. “Dean said he gave you the Horseman’s ring,” he clips out tersely. “Did he take it with him when he left?”

Sam thinks past his unease. “He never asked me for it…” He fumbles in his pocket, finds it tucked down in the furthest away corner, gritty with lint. “I still have it, but what the hell is going on, Bobby?”

Bobby takes the pewter ring, ignores the question, pushes up. “Come on, we need to find some shelter before this place is flattened. It’s a fuckin’ miracle they still have power.” As the words leave his mouth, the lights flicker and die. “Hexed us. Dammit.” Sam hears rummaging, and the old man snaps on his flashlight. “Come on,” he orders.

He’s already striding to the door, Castiel trailing behind him, and Sam is dazed by the speed of it all, grabs a hold of the younger man’s arm. “This is going too fast for me. What’s going on here, Cas?” he repeats. “Where is Dean?”

The motel room door swings in with a crash as Bobby twists the knob, and the old man’s eyes are creased half closed against the driving wind and rain as he looks back at Sam. He directs a finger towards the sky, flashing suddenly bright with far-off lightning. “Up there. Lucifer killed Gabriel, and Michael’s pissed off about it. This shitstorm is your brother strutting his stuff, boy, and it’s wiping this place off the map. Now we’re leaving, so get your backside in the truck. There’s a culvert a couple of miles away big enough to park up in, and low enough so it won’t funnel the wind.”

After a confused moment Sam complies speechlessly, nearly gets his legs ripped out from under him by the wind as he staggers the few feet to where the vehicle is parked, up close to the room, and climbs in behind Castiel. He stares out the passenger window as Bobby peels out of the parking lot. The sky is lit up with flashes, and black funnels weave their way wildly across the horizon, too many for him to count, whip-fast, undulating their hips like exotic dancers, and even through the closed windows the moaning wind is loud and terrifying as they tear along the debris-laden road.

“It ends with a bang,” Castiel breathes in his ear, from where he perches between Sam and Bobby. “It ends with my brothers.”

When Sam looks at him his eyes are glittering eerily in the half-lit truck cabin, part awestruck, part terrified, part something that might be exultation, so that Sam wonders if some small part of Castiel might still be programmed to want this. His memory flashes him back to his last proper conversation with his brother, Dean’s utter conviction,  _I’m going to slay the dragon, Sam_. Michael wanted it too, he thinks, and he shivers. “Have there been signs?” he shouts across at Bobby. “A quake in San Francisco? Florida, a hurricane?”

The old man nods, and he’s gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, squinting out while the windshield wipers fail miserably at clearing away leaves and ice crystals the size of golf balls. He hollers out incoherent abuse as he swerves to barely avoid a falling tree.

“And Croatoan too, we think,” Castiel says, leaning close to Sam’s ear again. “In some of the big cities.” The odd cast to his eyes is gone now, he seems defeated, depleted. “We think they must have—”

He stops abruptly, and Sam swivels around to look at him and his eyes are huge, staring out at something right there next to them. When Sam turns back to look, he can see chaotic, swirling air fifty yards away on the left, shimmying its way towards them. “Twister, Bobby, coming up fast,” he raps out urgently. “We’ll never outrun it, you need to make a sharp right and get off the road—”

His words are cut off by the impact as something slams down hard on the truck bed, and the vehicle is wrenched to a halt so suddenly that Castiel plows forward. Sam grabs for him reflexively, heaves him back as he thuds into the windshield, maybe one fraction of a second before he smashes straight through it. The other man flops back against the seat, rubbing at his brow, woozy with the blow, then flinches and ducks to the side as something crashes in through the back window of the cabin, flailing wildly and sending shards of glass shimmering every which way.

“Jesus,” Sam goggles. “Is that a—”

“Cow,” Bobby barks. “We need to get it off the truck, now.”

The old man is already jumping out of the cabin, and Sam follows suit, blinks in the freezing hail as it batters him and buries his face in his shoulder as he drags himself along the body of the truck. Up close he can hear the doomed animal shrieking out its agony above the rumble of the tornado, three hooves cutting through the busy air like clubs, the other leg hanging smashed and useless, and he feels his hair waft as one of its frantic limbs passes within a hair’s breadth of the side of his skull. He jumps back, hears the heavy blat of gunfire silence its death throes, clambers up into the back of the truck and pushes at its dead weight with his feet as Bobby heaves, and it falls away onto the road.

Sam jumps back down onto the asphalt, can hear loud groaning and smashing, crashing noises in the darkness. The wind howls Michael’s rage at him, and wraps jealous fingers around him as he clambers back into the cabin, Castiel recovering his wits sufficiently to pull on his arm as he strains against its force. There’s a brief tug-o-war with Sam as the prize until he manages to get his knee up on the seat and Castiel manhandles him the rest of the way in. They’re moving again almost immediately, Bobby swerving so that a gust slams the passenger door closed, and the truck bouncing more than ever on the rougher surface.

“How much farther?” Sam gasps, as he catches his breath and braces himself against the dashboard with one hand.

“I got no idea now we’re in country,” Bobby grates out. “Dammit. We were almost there.” Sam can feel the truck slowing, laboring. “Ground’s waterlogged,” Bobby snaps. “I was hoping to stay on the road for longer.” He pedals to the metal, staring out ahead, alert, slows it right down to steer around another fallen oak. “There it is. Thank fuckin’ God.” They swerve sharply, skid to a halt, and suddenly it’s quieter, the wind not buffeting the truck quite so powerfully, no hail raking across the roof, and they can see out front.

Sam swallows hard. “Do you think there was a tornado warning?”

Bobby nods at the clock on the dashboard. “I doubt it,” he replies tightly. “It’s four fifteen in the morning. Most people are still in bed.” He’s still gripping the steering wheel, the bones of his knuckles sharp, and there’s a moment of stillness punctuated only by their urgent breathing and the muffled wail of the weather before Bobby snaps on the radio, twirls the dial through crackling white noise,  _freak weather conditions are pummeling much of the… nadoes and the… heavy rain… vere thundersto… cipitation… storm total accumu… gusting at fifty to sixty… duced visability… power outages—_

Bobby snaps it off. “We get the picture,” he says tonelessly. He tugs at his beard. “What the hell happened to you anyway?” he says to Sam then, randomly. “And what has Meg got to do with it?”

Sam shudders, keeps it brief because he doesn’t ever want to revisit it in its full technicolor glory if he can help it. “Your basic strong-arm bad cop tactics, followed by the devil playing good cop.” He chews his lip. “I’ve been wondering when Lucifer got in him… I passed out in there for a while. But I think he was there all along. I think he made his move in Van Nuys.”

Castiel’s brow creases. “It makes sense,” he offers. “Lucifer would have felt Zachariah’s death. And Michael said he couldn’t track our brother.” He scowls. “Because of the sigils I stamped on Adam’s ribs. I should have known. Or suspected, at the very least.” He leans forward, rests his elbows on his thighs and palms his face, and Sam can see that his hands are shaking.

“Are you okay?” he asks. “Cas?”

“I’m fine,” Castiel says flatly. “Just not much use, I fear. Not any more.”

“What you said,” Sam ventures then, cautiously, and he hears his voice go hoarse and strained. “Is this really the beginning of the end?”

The other man is wiping blood away from a cut on his hairline now, examining it on the tips of his fingers. “I don’t know,” he says dully. “Gabriel chose sides. Lucifer killed him. Taking it out on humans like me is one thing, but Lucifer has killed an archangel. It changes things. There’s a pecking order, after all.”

Sam feels his jaw go slack for a moment now he has the chance to give it all due weight. “Lucifer killed Gabriel. Fuck.” He shakes his head. “How did that even happen? You’re going to have to catch me up, because—” He stops as Bobby gestures agitatedly, from the driver’s seat, mouths something that looks like  _bad fuckin’ idea_.

Sam sidetracks. “So, Meg… uh. Lucifer left me pretty bad off. Meg was there, I tapped her for some help.” He shrugs at Castiel’s grimace of distaste. “She hates Hell.”

He looks across to Bobby. “Remember what she said to Dean at your place, when she was in me? About it being a prison, and she didn’t want to go back there?” He switches his gaze to Castiel, still slumped with his face in his hands. “And I remembered what you said about Carthage, Cas, played on her insecurities. Crowley isn’t the only demon who doesn’t want the happy fun times here in this dimension to end.” He pauses, ponders that for a few seconds. “I bet a whole bunch of them wouldn’t if they knew Lucifer’s game plan was throwing them all back in the Pit.”

Castiel sniffs. “Perhaps we’ll get lucky and they’ll stage a revolution,” he says acidly. “I’m sure Lucifer will meet them halfway if—”

“They’re using you guys as collateral,” Dean cuts in from the back seat, and Sam can feel the swish that heralds his appearance. “What happened to your sigils?” Dean surges forward, pushing Sam aside, clamps his hand to Castiel’s chest, and there’s a snap of power that charges the air.

The other man yelps, grabs at himself, glowers. “Again?”

Dean cuffs the back of Castiel’s head halfheartedly, slumps back into the shadows, his face hidden. “Yes, again,” he retorts. “If he’d been looking for you, you’d be toast. Again. What happened to your sigils? Did you crack a rib in your barfight? You said that guy didn’t hit you there.”

Bobby snaps on the cabin light. “His ribs got busted out at my place just before you showed up,” he says pointedly. “Gabriel must have left the sigils off when he brought him back.”

“At least it meant you were able to find us,” Sam chips in. “And Jesus, Dean, what the hell happened to you?”

In the dim light he can see Dean is soaked, bleary-eyed, face cut and bruised, blood trickling from his nose, and the knuckles of the hand he’s resting on his belly are split to gleaming cartilage as far as Sam can see. When he replies, he sounds weary, drained of energy. “It’s okay, Sam. He’s just – giving as good as he gets, even if he is the stunt double. It’s tiring.”

Sam is up and out the passenger door the minute his brother finishes talking, so fast he feels dizzy, and he plasters his body close up to the truck as he’s buffeted by icy winds shrieking in under the stone arch. He hauls the passenger door open, crowds in next to Dean on the back seat, starts assessing the damage. “Where is he?” he asks, as he flicks his eyes to Bobby. “First aid kit?”

The old man nods. “Duffel, under the seat there.”

“He got away from me. For now.” Dean lifts an arm, slowly, stiffly, like it hurts to move, rests it over his eyes. “Castiel,” he says quietly. “Are you alright?”

“I’ll live,” Castiel replies, and his mouth is a grim line. “Will you?”

Dean peers out from under his arm, and his mouth quirks wryly. “I’m peachy. Never better.”

“I remade you,” Castiel says, and his tone is raw, and Sam sees his eyes go flinty gray. “I know you inside and out. Don’t lie to me.”

Dean snorts. “You look like you’re gonna shout at me.” He flops his arm back down across the seat, makes a face. “It isn’t kill shots yet, but he’s cut me up some.”

Bobby makes an unidentifiable noise of frustration, and his eyebrows shoot up under his cap. “Now the Hallmark moment is over, what the hell game are you playing out there with him, boy?” the old man snaps out. “You’re leveling this whole town. What about that crap you fed me about us not burning? What the fuck is—”

Dean interrupts with an affronted hiss. He leans forward, past Sam, stares right at Bobby, and his face goes set and steely, and his voice rumbles out low and lethally controlled, and almost reverent. “Understand that this is my nature,” he says coldly. “It’s inherent, innate and intrinsic. What I’m doing is my reason for existing in the here and now. It’s my aim, my goal, and my purpose. And it comforts me, Bobby. Because not everyone in this town is worthy.”

He pauses, slants his eyes to the right then, straight at Sam, and they’re glowing incandescent, as alien as Lucifer’s were in the dream, because Sam isn’t looking at Dean, he’s looking at Michael. “This is what I’m supposed to do,” he says. “You ask me to go against my basic instinct. And maybe you ask too much.”

It numbs Sam to the bone, and he blinks furiously in the dim light, hears his breath go fast and harsh, feels himself start to shake with the buzz of adrenaline, panic, sickly fear, feels sweat prickle on his spine, as Bobby grunts out a strangled noise, and Castiel stares at them all with an incongruous look of curiosity mixed with bewilderment.

“What are you saying?” the old man barks, and he’s wide-eyed and breathless with a sort of incredulous horror. “Are you back to preaching your prime fuckin’ directive? Are you _ending_  this? Are you seriously condemning us to a fuckin’ eternity of—”

“The end is the beginning,” Dean says simply, and softer now, melancholy. “Eternity is just another possibility.”

Bobby doesn’t reply, just stares back, and there’s a strained, heavy silence that drags on for long seconds, until Castiel clears his throat.

“Michael,” he reprimands faintly. “Enough.”

It hangs there in the air between them, and they’re all poised for something but Sam doesn’t know what, and the atmosphere is incendiary and vibrant, like one wrong word might set it off.

“I’m sorry,” Dean mutters then. “I don’t know what… it’s – it’s like I’m conditioned to do this. And it’s difficult not to.” He sighs out slowly, leans back into Sam.

“Dammit, Dean, there’s blood everywhere,” Sam snaps, now the moment is over and his brother is back. “Look at your arms. Aren’t you supposed to heal yourself? Is this because of what Pestilence did?” He pulls apart the ripped pieces of Dean’s bloodstained tee, swallows as he sees a vicious, deep diagonal slash running down his brother’s ribs and across to the opposite hip. “Why is this even here?” he demands. “What about your mojo?”

Dean bats his hand away irritably. “Leave it, Sam.” He nods down at something lying on the seat beside him. “It’s from one of those.”

Sam sees the glint of silver, glances back up and across to Castiel.

“Gabriel’s,” Castiel confirms, and he scrubs tiredly at his jaw. “Think of it as the nuclear-powered lightsaber. One of the few things that can damage an archangel. And yes, Lucifer has one.”

“Mine’s bigger,” Dean says on the ghost of a smile, but he’s fisting his hands restlessly, and his eyes dart from Sam to Bobby to Castiel and back again, finally settling on the old man. “Jesus, look at you guys,” he snorts out. “You’d think it was the end of the world or something.”

Sam scowls. “That isn’t funny, Dean.”

“Come on, it’s a little funny.” Dean sucks in breath as Sam prods at the wound across his belly, slaps his questing hand away again. “Jesus, Sam. Be careful.”

“I think this needs stitching.” Sam glances over at Castiel. “Will it heal by itself?”

Castiel shrugs listlessly. “Eventually. But he needs to rest. The blade, it – it will have cut deep.” He widens his eyes meaningfully. “Deeper than we’re able to see.”

Sam feels his brother shudder next to him. “So please tell me we have all the rings,” Dean says again. “Give me an alternative. Because I’m feeling tired. And because soon it will be kill shots. And because…” He trails off, flicks his eyes up to Bobby. “Because I’m a killer,” he breathes. “And it’s so damned tempting.” And it falls quiet again, a pall of silence blanketing all of them.

“We have the rings,” Bobby says finally.

The noise from outside fades away, and the flurry of leaves whirling in front of the windshield slow down until they fall still and slide down the glass. And Dean is suddenly placid, slumping even more pliantly against Sam. “If they don’t work, I will have to stop him, Bobby,” he says flatly. “I won’t have a choice. And now I need to sleep. And you need to start driving.”

“Start driving?” the old man queries faintly.

“To Colt’s cemetery,” Dean murmurs, and when Sam looks down he sees his brother’s eyes are closing. “To the hellgate. That’s where we send that bastard screaming back to the Pit. Or that’s where it ends.”

Dean shuts down then, just like that, head lolling and body completely slack against Sam’s. And Sam tamps down his wariness, ignores the tightening in his stomach,   _fear_ , and listens to the ache in his chest, because this is trust, this is his brother vulnerable and giving himself over into Sam’s care, and maybe there have been times when he thought Dean’s faith in him would never really be what it was. He pulls his brother close and safe, and he clamps a hand to the short hair at Dean’s nape and tucks his head under his chin, holds onto him. It’s a moment of peace and stillness at last, even if he can still feel a hum of something, power maybe, coursing under Dean’s skin, and emanating off him. It’s heated, the same buzz Castiel gives off,  _gave_  off, and goosebumps sprout on Sam’s arms. He glances over at the other two men, and Castiel’s eyes are drifting closed, shadowed with his own exhaustion. “What is it with the rings?” Sam whispers.

Bobby glances from him to Castiel, rolls his eyes as the other man’s head starts to nod. “We can use them,” he says. “The cage is still down there. The rings can lock him back in there. Don’t ask me how, but that’s what Gabriel planted in your brother’s –  _Michael_ ’s…” He grimaces. “Hell, I don’t know. But his head, anyway.” He eyes Sam for a moment. “The riddle, remember? He was talking about the Horsemen’s rings.”

Sam blinks back at him. “I’m not – I don’t follow,” he stumbles out past his dry throat and the crushing reminder that maybe the trust isn’t real at all, and maybe the ground between him and Dean isn’t as level as he hopes, as he remembers how his brother snapped Gabriel off the same plane of existence as them so that Sam wouldn’t know.

“Sam. Dean couldn’t tell you,” Castiel says, quiet but emphatic, eyes drowsy and half-lidded as he rouses himself briefly. He stifles a yawn even as he reads Sam’s mind loud and clear. “It was strategic. He couldn’t take the risk, you know that. We only had two of the rings.”

Bobby is turning the engine over, easing the truck out into hazy dawn light filtering down through thick banks of cloud. “He’s right,” he throws back bluntly over his shoulder. “If Lucifer had known about this, we’d never have gotten all four. Pestilence was right there under his nose, ring and all.”

“And you think Lucifer would have found out,” Sam says softly, but he doesn’t mention Detroit, doesn’t mention that he knows damn well why they all think that. “Because you think I would have told him.”

The old man is carefully neutral. “Not intentionally.” Sam sees his eyes flick up to the rearview mirror and back down again to the road ahead. “You didn’t know he was in Adam.”

Sam stares at the back of the old man’s head, and he thinks of Adam,  _not-Adam_ , how utterly convincing he was, because Sam never really knew him, and neither did Dean. It flits through his head, Dean’s face, implacable, after he zapped Gabriel who knows where, Dean’s words,  _you’re easily led, Sam_. But even if he knows in his heart it was tactics, just like his brother said, Sam can’t help it, hurt flares up inside him, the pressure of it pulsing energetically behind his eyes, and his mouth tastes sour with it.

***

Sam doubletakes, because the last thing he can remember is his brother’s warmth sprawled across him, and Dean drooling into his shirt while his own eyes grew tired and lassitude crept along his limbs as he stared out the window of the truck at the destruction littering the highway. But now he’s standing on the red planet, pink and orange rock formations stretching out as far as the eye can see, and he spins as he hears a foot scuff on the shale behind him. And there is his brother, amused and smiling, looking damned pleased with himself. Dean is squinting in the boiling sun, and his cheeks are pink with it, sweat glistening on his skin and his tee stuck to his body in damp patches.

“I’m dreaming,” Sam says ruefully. “But why the Martian Chronicles fantasy?”

“We aren’t on Mars, idiot,” his brother retorts. “In fact, would you believe this is the Bright Angel trail?”

“The Grand Canyon.” Sam can feel sweat running down his own back, and he peels off his jacket and shirt. “How can I even think out loud if I’m dreaming?” he puzzles. “How can I be hot and dripping sweat in a dream?”

Dean leers at him. “Seriously? You’ve never worked up a scorching hot sweat while you were dreaming?”

Sam eyes him skeptically, because he’s heard his brother beg for mercy and scream out imagined agony so often in his dreams that he knows damn well it isn’t Dean who’s working up a sweat in them. He ignores the fake bravado. “Why are you even in my dream?” he asks instead.

“How do you know I’m me?” his brother challenges mockingly, and he crosses his arms, smug.

“Grand Canyon, Dean,” Sam says pointedly. “Only you would bring me here.”

Dean smiles, satisfied, looks up and beyond Sam, and he gestures. “See that stripe up top there? The yellow limestone? It’s the youngest layer, and it’s still older than the dinosaurs. Pretty cool, huh?” He bends, picks up a loose rock. “Check it out.” He points to the petrified remains of a shrimp-like creature picked out as lines in the surface. “This used to be sea.”

Sam studies his brother some more, and Dean’s face is bright and open and young, his eyes shining with awe, and he hates himself for saying it. “Dean. What is this? Why are you dream stalking me?”

Dean throws out an arm. “Sea,” he repeats enthusiastically. “Arizona was almost right on the Equator then. But further down it’s sandstone, Sammy. Widest fuckin’ beach you ever saw lay right there, two hundred and sixty million years ago, and—”

“Okay,” Sam says then, and he thinks  _fuck it_ , he’ll poke the bear if that’s what it takes. “Michael,” he snaps, and he pauses, lets it hang there.

“Low blow, Sam,” Dean replies, and he frowns, his eyes going hard for a flash of a second.

Sam cants his head in concession, just barely, and he looks his brother up and down. Dean on the outside, he thinks, but coiled-up murderous celestial energy on the inside, and he remembers the blinding light and the earsplitting noise of Van Nuys, remembers what he saw at Nivaeus, because this is the shell of something larger and more powerful than he can even really imagine. The prince of light, Gabriel called him, and it gives Sam a hollow feeling of dread and foreboding. “What’s going to happen to you?” he asks randomly. “Afterwards? What’s going to happen to you? Will I still have a brother?”

Dean shrugs, composure regained. “I don’t honestly know,” he says reflectively. He squats down, picks out a few more small rocks, studies them. “There wasn’t supposed to be an afterwards. I’m flying by the seat of my pants here.”

Sam ponders that for a second. “You mean with the rings,” he says.

“I mean with the rings.”

“You never told me about the rings.” Sam keeps his voice level, isn’t hurling accusations although the same stab of bitterness he felt when Bobby told him gets him in the ribs again.

“Nope,” Dean replies, and he’s just as neutral in return. “I never told you about the rings.”

Sam’s fingers twitch, and he has to clench his fists to stop the tremor as he counts back from ten, but when he answers his brother, he knows he means it. “I would have told him,” he murmurs. “I thought he was Adam right up until he wasn’t. It was the right decision.”

Dean is arranging his rocks in a small pile now, stacking them methodically, and he seems totally absorbed. “Yes, it was,” he says, and it’s offhand, no trace of censure or reprimand. “And like I said before, it was only ever strategy.”

Sam can’t honestly work out whether his brother’s apparent detachment is a deliberate avoidance technique or not, so he forces the issue. “You didn’t trust me because I fall for their crap every fucking time,” he says. “It’s my fault line.”

Dean makes a noise Sam can’t quite decode, shakes his head. “You want to see the good in people, Sam,” he replies simply. “It isn’t a fault line, not really. Soon this is going to be over. And maybe seeing the good in people will be what keeps you sane, what keeps you from barricading yourself out in the boonies with nothing but rotgut whiskey and attack dogs for company, like Rufus and Bobby do.” He nods, to himself maybe, because he still isn’t looking at Sam. “Maybe seeing the good in people means you’ll be able to have that normal life you always wanted.”

Sam teeters on his back foot for a minute, because he can’t quite wrap his mind around the concept of a normal life, can’t even remember ever wanting that, and he thinks it might not really be an option for him any more. “Don’t sidetrack me, Dean,” he says bluntly. “I haven’t wanted that for a long time.” He sees his brother huff out minutely as he’s rumbled. “You thought he’d find a way to turn me, like you said before Van Nuys,” he persists carefully. “You thought that because you saw me. In the future.”

Dean’s shoulders stiffen, and his voice goes harsh. “Did Castiel tell you that?”

Even if Sam suspected Castiel wasn’t telling him everything back at Nivaeus, it still stings, and the words catch in his throat when he replies. “So Cas did know about it?”

His brother looks up at him at last, and a flash of understanding passes through his eyes. “I needed to talk to someone about it,” he says quietly. “He’s my friend. He’s a good listener. And I didn’t want you worrying about it.”

Sam regards him for a long moment. “Cas didn’t tell me,” he says finally. “He hinted… at least I think he did. I know he didn’t want me going to Detroit, anyway.” He smiles ruefully. “But he didn’t tell me. Cas is all yours, Dean. He’s always going to choose you. Every damn time.”

Dean watches him, silent, his expression unreadable. 

“Anyway,” Sam continues. “ _He_  told me. Lucifer.” He swallows thickly, forges ahead more cautiously. “It, uh… wasn’t all he said.”

And Dean suddenly barks out a brittle laugh. “Yeah? Well, all of it’s true.” It’s flippant but there’s an edge to his voice, annoyance, hurt maybe, and he reaches up, rubs at his brow.

“You don’t even know what he told me,” Sam says faintly.

“I can guess.” Dean snorts. “Let me in, Mary…” he taunts. “Say yes. I’ll watch over him, take care of him… if you say yes to me.” He fixes Sam with eyes that flash with a sharp gleam. “That sound about right? Just for starters, I mean?”

Sam feels his mouth go slack and he sits down heavily on the ground a few feet away from Dean. He’s dazed, his skin suddenly chilled, and his guts are roiling inside him as he runs a shaking hand through his hair. “You aren’t my brother,” he whispers.

Dean regards him for a moment. “I wasn’t then,” he clarifies calmly. “That was –  _before_.” He narrows his eyes at the frigid look Sam sends blasting his way, throws up his hands. “Look, Sam, I’m sorry, but I don’t know how else to explain it,” he says, and his tone is almost defiant now. “What do you want me to say? There isn’t anything to say. This is a done deal. It’s just – how it was. And this is how it is.” He furrows his brow. “I’m sorry,” he repeats.

They lapse into another silence and after a few minutes, Sam looks up, sees Dean’s gaze focused intently on him, the same inhuman laser focus Castiel has always fixed on Dean, a mix of interest, and hope, and affection. And in that same second it hits him in his heart that it’s the same  _human_  laser focus Dean has always fixed on him, the same mix of interest, and hope, and affection he’s seen in Dean’s eyes for as far back as he has the capacity to remember. “You’re looking at me like Cas always looks at you,” he ventures grudgingly. “You’re looking at me like you’ve always looked at me.” He looses a long, slow breath. “Like my brother looks at me.” He sees Dean visibly relax as he exhales. “What’s it like?” he prompts softly. “Being him? What does it feel like?”

Dean sucks his bottom lip in. “It, uh… feels normal,” he says warily. “It feels like being me. Since I am me and all. Like I keep saying. I know you don’t like it, Sam, but… this is who I was meant to be.” He smirks again, but this time it’s weak at best. “He completes me.”

It fills Sam with a sort of confused dread, and he feels a sudden burn in his eyes. “Don’t, Dean,” he grates out. “Please don’t start that destiny crap again. Because if this is who you’re meant to be, then what about me?” He scrubs a hand through his hair, feels frustrated beyond belief as he remembers Lucifer’s words in the dream. “I asked you to end this for me,” he says desperately. “But you fixed me. And now you’re telling me that everything he told me is true, and you’re talking about destiny. But what does that mean for me? Who am I meant to be? Did you bring me back to say yes to him? Because he completes  _me_?”

Dean fixes him with a serious look, furrows his brow, bites his lip. “Sam, look, I didn’t—” 

Sam cuts in, but his voice cracks dryly when he speaks. “When they were trying to get me to say yes I had this – _movie_ , almost, playing in my head. Like all these memories, all running together, good times, bad times, hunts. You and me together… the  _deal_. You went to Hell for me.” He falters, has to work to suck in breath because his chest is constricted so tight it’s like he has a metal band wrapped around it. He’s aware of Dean watching him, impassive, and he reins his emotions in, clenches his jaw so hard it makes his teeth ache. “I’m trying to keep a grip on things here, Dean,” he says, low and controlled now. “Was any of it real? Did you deal for me because there was a  _plan_? Did you fix me because you were supposed to? For  _this_?”

Dean leans back on his hands, and Sam sees his gaze roam about the landscape, settle on the horizon. “I remember when mom and dad came home from the hospital with you,” he says, and it’s so out of leftfield it throws Sam totally off guard, and he flounders, bewildered.

“Jesus,” Dean breathes. “You were so fuckin’ loud… all you did was cry, and feed, and puke, and fart, and shit everywhere.” He stops, shakes his head, rolls his eyes. “And there was this one time, maybe week two or three, when mom was changing your diaper and you pissed in your own eye. Right in there, and it didn’t phase you one bit. You didn’t even blink.” His lips quirk up in an easy grin. “You looked proud of yourself. It was a high point, damn impressive. And right then I thought to myself, I can work with this guy. And man, for a whole week after that every time I went to the can I tried to piss in my own eye, and I never could.”

He stands up, walks away a few paces. “This is where I had my rendezvous with Death,” he remarks matter-of-factly. “Remember what I said? In the car on the way to Bobby’s after Van Nuys?”

And Sam does. “On some scarred slope of battered hill,” he echoes his brother’s words. “Jesus, it was only a week and a half ago.”

“Would you believe, it’s his favorite place,” Dean says. “He might even be here now. He brought me here because he knew I always wanted to see it. You knew that too. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon with my brother, with  _you_ , just one time.” His voice goes wistful, and he glances back over his shoulder at Sam, and his eyes are gentle and indulgent, because he’s looking at Sam the way he used to when they were kids and two weeks holed up in some roach motel off a back road, with their dad four states away, was as bad as it got. “I know what Lucifer told you,” he says. “Now you hear this. You’re in my blood, my cells, my bones. And you’re in my heart, Sam. And I don’t regret anything I’ve done, because I did it for you and for me. Not for them. And not for the plan.” He finishes up slow and deliberate. “I’m your brother. In all the ways that matter. And it was real. All of it.”

Sam stares at Dean, and it starts as a flare of apprehension but then abruptly he feels something give way in his chest, as he realizes what this is so sharply and so keenly that it winds him better than any punch to the guts ever could. He gasps with it, and he already feels lonely, feels the ache of loss. “You’re saying goodbye to me,” he chokes out. “That’s why you brought me here.”

Dean steps across the small distance between them, eases down again gracefully. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, Sam,” he offers again, his expression impassive. “But I want you to know I didn’t fix you because I think you’ll say yes to him, or because I want you to.” His tone switches then, to resolute. “I fixed you because I need you with me for this. Team Free Will, remember? Free will, because maybe I have this feeling you’ll never say yes to him. I’m not even going to ask you to promise me you won’t do that…”

He trails off, and Sam can almost hear the words that hang unsaid. “But you’re going to ask me to promise you something else,” Sam murmurs. “Something I won’t like.”

Dean’s gaze softens again. “You have to promise to let me go, Sam, if that’s what it takes.” He raises a hand as Sam starts to protest, and he smiles. “Sam. This is right, it’s how it’s meant to be. Not because of any hidden agendas or prophecies, but because I started this. That’s why I have to finish it. And that’s why you have to let go of me if that’s what it takes.”

Sam clears his throat, reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, and he feels hollow inside. “I, uh. Don’t think I can do that, Dean. In fact, I know I can’t.”

Dean shakes his head. “Not interested, Sam. You let go, and you live your life. Keep seeing the good in people.”

“Like the last time?” Sam chokes out. “Like that turned out so well? Like I’m not going to see the good in the next demon who—”

“You  _can_  let go, and you damn well will,” Dean jumps in, and his eyes are flaring annoyance at Sam now. “This isn’t like the last time, Sam. This isn’t going to be about you tearing yourself apart inside over me dealing for you, because I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing this for me. I began this, it’s on  _me_ , not on you. And if anything happens to me, that isn’t on you either. There is no guilt. Do you hear me?” Dean is agitated, his eyes huge and intense. “There is no losing yourself in grief and demon blood this time. You stick with Bobby and Cas, you keep it together.” He’s breathing fast, and he stops, takes a few deep breaths to calm himself.

Sam takes advantage of the pause, makes his own voice firm. “What about you?”

Dean’s expression shifts to puzzled, and he cocks his head, thrown off kilter himself. “What about me?”

“This goes for you too, Dean,” Sam says. “You sold your fucking  _soul_  for me. Do you have any idea… Jesus.  _Jesus_.” He finds he’s swallowing down bile, that even the memory of it, the thought of what his brother endured for Sam to throw it all back at him, still makes him feel like he might start screaming and never stop. He sees Dean flush slightly and his eyes fall away for a few seconds. Sam scrunches his own eyes shut, palms his cheeks for a moment, finds some semblance of control before he fixes his brother with a flat stare. “We’re going up against the devil,” he says. “Anything could happen, to any one of us. That means you have to be prepared to let go too. I want your promise too.”

Dean blinks at him. “Okay,” he replies carelessly. “I promise.”

Sam eyes his brother speculatively, because he knows Dean can lie as smoothly as anyone on the planet without any tells in the equation. And right out of the blue he remembers how his brother couldn’t kill Crowley, so he pushes. “I want to you swear to it,” he rasps out. “On your Father’s honor.  _Michael_.”

And Dean looks briefly, faintly shocked, and he frowns, huffs out a derisive sound of disbelief.

“I mean it,” Sam insists. “Look me in the eye. Say the words. And no deals either.”

Dean smiles a wry, unwilling smile that leaves his eyes icy cold, and a muscle in his cheek twitches. “I swear, on my Father’s honor,” he says.

“Swear to what?” Sam says determinedly.

“I swear on my Father’s honor to let you go if I have to.” Dean’s voice is quiet, almost a whisper. “And no deals.”

It’s genuine acquiescence, as far as Sam can tell, and he knows it’s as good an assurance as he’s likely to get. He nods, satisfied, pulls his legs up and hugs them, leaning his chin on his knees, and he drinks in the view, the utter silence of the gorge that surrounds them, the many hues of the sun-baked red dirt and rocks that stretch out and rise up as far as he can see. “We should come back here when this is over,” he says, with a forced cheer he hopes sounds convincing. “After all this goes down. Do the whole tourist thing, mule ride, whitewater rafting. What do you say?”

Dean clears his throat beside him, and his reply comes out rough, with a tremor, because he isn’t fooled at all. “That’d be good.”

A few minutes stretch out into the silence, and Sam sees his brother cast a furtive look his way. “Sam, hear me out,” Dean starts hesitantly. “If this does go badly, if something does happen…” He sighs, chews his lip. “I need to know you’ll watch out for Cas. Bobby said he will, but Bobby – well. He doesn’t have the best track record. If anything happens, Cas isn’t going to cope with it. In the future, he was a drunk, basically. And he’s, uh… getting lost, I think. It’s starting already. So please, just – take care of him for me.”

Sam meets his brother’s gaze, and Dean’s expression is earnest, naked in a way he hasn’t seen since the hospital parking lot when the hurt ached out of his brother’s eyes as he told Sam they could never be what they were. “Nerd angels,” Sam says softly. “They get under your skin, I guess.”

Dean smiles nervously, shrugs, and it’s maybe a tad defensive. “You’re my heart, Sam,” he says. “But he knows me in ways nobody else does or ever will, even you. He’s – I don’t know. My soul, I think. I guess it’s the Hell thing… I’m marked, he’s marked. Just – you know. Make sure he’s okay.” He makes his voice stern then. “And he can help you too. You need to all be together after this. No lighting out by yourself this time, Sam.”

Sam hesitates for a second. “Nothing is going to happen to you, Dean,” he says, low and intense. “Not while I’m around. I’ve got your back.”

Dean exhales long and feelingly, squares his jaw, looks down at the ground, nods in acknowledgment before he huffs out in frustration. “I wasn’t kidding when I said this feels normal and right, Sam. But, uh, at the same time?” His voice is sincere but reluctant too, like he isn’t sure whether he should be confiding in Sam at all. “It’s sort of like a curse or something. The world is too loud, and too bright. People are transparent, and I see into their souls, see things I don’t really want to see, see that some of them maybe aren’t worth saving. And you and Bobby, you look at me and I know you’re both trying to deal, but you’re not, not really.” He frowns. “You two both look at me like I’m not me any more. I’m being pulled in all directions. So, anyway. I have – _doubts_.”

It crashes in suddenly on Sam, and he places a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Jesus, Dean, I’m so sorry,” he says quietly. “We’ve been so damn busy thinking about how this was affecting us, we never even wondered about—”

And Dean interrupts, and it’s like he never even heard Sam. “But you know what sucks most about all of this?” he says. “That a twenty-year-old kid who could have actually had a normal life has Lucifer hitching a ride inside him. Because of us.” His tone is a bleak mix of anger, and sorrow, and self-loathing. “He’s the only one of us who’s innocent, Sam, and he’s in there screaming for help. And when I end this, do you know where he’s going? Where his soul is going to spend eternity? In a box, in the cesspit of Hell. With only the devil for company.”

***

Sam’s eyes snap open, but he stays absolutely still because Dean is still a dead weight slumped across him. The truck’s motion has stopped, and Bobby’s low snores vibrate across from the front of the cabin. He glances out the window, sees moonlit gravestones stretching out and uphill. Colt’s cemetery.

He drifts his gaze across to Castiel, and the other man’s arm is running the length of the front seat, his cheek resting on it as he watches Dean sleep. He seems unaware that Sam is awake, and even if his eyes are still bleary, his expression is as open and unguarded as Dean’s was in the dream when he asked Sam to take care of Cas, as open and unguarded as it has always been. And it tightens Sam’s chest all over again as he realizes Castiel is the only one of them who still looks at Dean like he always has.

“I don’t get what you and Dean have, Cas, not really,” Sam breathes out into the gloom, and Castiel’s eyes flick up to meet his. “But I know he loves you. And you love him. So if anything should—”

“I’ll take care of him,” Castiel cuts in gently. “I’ll keep him safe. You have my word. It’s what I was sent here to do, after all.”

Sam smiles. “That isn’t why you do it, though. I don’t think it ever really was.”

“No,” the other man concedes. “That isn’t why I do it. And I don’t really understand it myself, Sam, if it’s my connection to Michael or… something else.” He smiles back, and it’s wistful, maybe almost rueful too. “It’s just – how it is.”

“Well. Whatever it is, he never really had a friend before you,” Sam murmurs. Castiel is still staring back, his gaze unyielding. “And I never thanked you,” Sam says hesitantly. “For giving him back to me. Thank you.”

Castiel inclines his head just barely. “You’re welcome, Sam.”

Dean is shifting slightly against Sam, mutters out the word _no_ , and Sam rests a hand on his arm, feels him go still again. But the word hangs there, makes him think of screaming, frenzied nightmares, and pleading, makes him think of forty years of torture and suffering. And the desperate, terrified face he sees in his head blurs, and merges into Adam’s, and he shivers.

***

Dean wakes up and smells the coffee, hears paper rustling from up front, the sound of the radio, volume turned low. He peels himself carefully off his brother, pulls Sam’s jacket up to cover his sprawled bulk, marvels silently at how big Sam grew and remembers the first day he ever saw him, and how the sole of his newborn brother’s foot fit on his four-year-old palm.

Bobby shoots a baleful look back, lifts up a bag. “We found a diner with power,” he whispers. “But I guess you aren’t hungry.” His eyes track down. “How’s the…” He motions his head.

Dean pulls up his torn tee, examines his ribcage and belly, prods at the long red slash, faintly puffy but sealed now and only vaguely tender. “It’s good. I’m good.”

Bobby sniffs, snaps off the radio. “Well, the world has gone in the shitter while you recharged,” he grunts. “Power’s cutting in and out across the upper Midwest… weather’s crazy, storms, twisters, blizzards, landslips, floods. Whole towns destroyed, hundreds dead.” He’s subdued, but his voice just edges into belligerence. “Castiel says it’s the aftershocks from your little pissing contest with Lucifer. So I guess we can expect more of the same.”

Dean contemplates the old man gravely for a moment, ponders the wisdom of pointing out that even plan B comes with collateral damage that simply can’t be avoided. But Bobby is pale, exhausted looking, past the point of understanding any of this, because it’s too big for him to comprehend. Naturally, Dean stalls. “You look tired,” he observes. “And where is Castiel?”

If Bobby is aware he’s being diverted, he doesn’t let on. He nods out the window. “Taking a leak up against that tree.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Castiel eats like a fuckin’ horse,” he comments randomly. “He eats even more than you do. _Did_. And I got no sleep with his nightmares. Him neither. Had to keep rousing him so he wouldn’t wake you and Sam. I always heard you never went back into the same nightmare if someone woke you up.” He sighs. “It don’t seem to be true for him. Like it wasn’t for you afterwards.”

Dean can see Castiel outside now, windmilling his arms and stamping his boots on the ground. “It’ll get better for him,” he says.

It can’t have been as convincing as he hoped, because Bobby huffs doubtfully. “You think so? It isn’t just Hell for him. He’s lost a part of himself. It don’t seem right.” The old man taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s not a natural state for him,” he mutters. “He isn’t meant to be this. And he’s been asking me for booze.”

Dean sighs through the wave of resignation. “Well, don’t give him any.” He rolls his shoulders, reaches for the door handle. “I don’t have time for this,” he adds shortly.

The line creasing the bridge of Bobby’s nose deepens, and he sags visibly. “You ain’t Dean any more, are you?” he says softly. “Not really. He’s gone. If he was ever really here.” He studies Dean with a brief, critical eye. “I parked up near the grave,” he says, suddenly brusque. “It’s just to the left of us.”

And Dean nods, slides out of the truck.

Colt’s cemetery is as cold and desolate in the gloom as he remembers it, and even though he doesn’t feel the chill on the air he shivers and hugs himself as he walks over to stand in front of the mausoleum where it all went down. He tracks his eyes over to the gravestone Yellow Eyes flung him into, where he slumped, and shuddered out his revulsion, and wondered if his brother might not be one hundred percent pure Sammy any more even as he pulled the trigger and loosed the bullet that sent the demon screaming out of existence. And there is where John Winchester gazed at him with eyes that brimmed with his love, and maybe with his knowledge of Dean’s own deal.

Bobby is crunching his way over dead leaves and gravel, glowering at his wristwatch and frowning up at the overcast sky. “It’s ten-thirty in the morning,” he observes irritably. “Why is it getting so dark?”

“The sun is going to switch off,” Castiel says, from a few feet behind him, and he glances meaningfully at Dean. “And the moon shall not cause her light to shine either. It’s a solar eclipse. One of the portents.”

Dean shrugs. “This is how it starts,” he says distantly. “Everything is lined up as it should be. It’s a new moon, in conjunction with the sun. The totality is going to hit right here.”

Bobby grimaces. “According to your prophecies.”

Dean can sense it emanating from the old man, that odd mix of curiosity, fascination, love and distaste he’s been giving off since Dean rested his hand on Bobby’s leg and knitted his severed spinal cord back together with nothing more than his own intention and desire to do so, regenerating cells, reattaching shredded bundles of nerve fibers, reawakening his numbed lumbar and sacral regions, reestablishing the  _get off your butt and walk_  messages Zachariah had shut down. Bobby squats, starts rooting in his backpack. “I have sunglasses somewhere,” he mutters. “And what’s the plan? Lucifer can’t find us, can he, so how are we getting him here? Or will he know because of the eclipse?”

Dean stares up into the murky gray, chews his lip before he cants his eyes down at Bobby. “It’s time for you to go,” he says.

Bobby looks up. “Say what?” he queries confusedly, and a flicker of alarm skates across his face, his eyebrows meeting in the middle and tenting upwards under the peak of his cap.

“It’s time for you to go,” Dean repeats, louder and more firmly. “You and Castiel. I’ll send you back to the lot, and if this doesn’t work—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Castiel announces, predictably and mulishly, as Bobby shoots upright and pins Dean with flinty eyes.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the old man barks out sharply. “We ain’t leaving you to do this alone. You can forget it.”

It’s to be expected, Dean supposes. Bobby never has backed away from trouble and he knows damn well the old man is still suspicious he’ll light up the roast instead of using the rings. And he knows Castiel will throw himself into the flames for him because he has before, and will again if any variation of Zachariah’s future plays out. “No,” he raps out decisively. “None of this is your fault, either of you, and ending it isn’t your job.” He stares them both down as they gape at him. “Lucifer will use any and every means to try to stop me, and you could be hurt or killed.” He shrugs. “And anyway, I won’t be alone. Sam’s staying. I need him for this.”

Bobby’s face goes puce with annoyance. “Well, the words big and britches come to mind. Boy, you got more neck than a fuckin’ giraffe, do you seriously think I’d—”

“I’m not your boy,” Dean cuts in gently. “Not really, Bobby. Not the one you want, anyway.” He sees the barely perceptible flicker of guilt in Bobby’s eyes. “And once this begins, I will use any method at my disposal to distract him, to divert him, to deceive him, to stop him.” He pauses for them to absorb what he’s saying. “ _Any method_ ,” he emphasizes. “And that means you could be hurt or killed.”

Castiel clears his throat pointedly. “In point of fact, this is partly my fault,” he says placidly. “I helped start this when I let Sam out of the panic room. And as far as I’m concerned, that makes helping to end it my job also.” He crosses his arms, raises an eyebrow, and it’s  _insouciant_ , Dean thinks, it’s _I like past you_ , and it makes his guts curdle. “Team Free Will, remember?” Castiel challenges. “Trot out your smiting voice and laser eyes all you like, Michael, but you won’t be using your magic finger on me.”

Bobby tracks his eyes across to the younger man, and then back to Dean. “I could have stopped Sam from leaving to kill Lilith and I didn’t,” he offers gruffly. “Far as I’m concerned, I’m in the chain of blame too.”

Dean nods slowly, breathes in deep. “I keep wondering if anything will change,” he says quietly. “Or if we all end up where we’re supposed to in the end, because all roads lead to Rome.” He slants his gaze up, and they’re both glancing _what the fuck is it now?_  at each other. He swallows hard. “Okay,” he starts. “Sam isn’t the only one I sugarcoated it for.”

They turn their attention back to him now, and they’re staring at him, quizzical.

“So here it is,” he continues. “I don’t know exactly what happened to you, Bobby… your place was a mess, derelict, overgrown. Your wheelchair was there, all shot up. Bullet holes through the back of it, bloodstains.” The memory of it takes his breath away for a second, and he falters briefly before plowing on. “I don’t understand it, because you were in the photograph of the camp. You must’ve had to head back to Sioux Falls for some reason. Anyway, that’s where they got you. Croats, I guess… everything was smashed to bits, it looked like their special brand of crazy. Though I guess it could have been demons.”

Bobby’s reply is faint, cracks slightly. “Dean, for—”

“Whatever, you weren’t at Chitaqua with the rest of us… by then, anyway,” Dean goes on. “But you were, Cas.” He smiles as his focus shifts, even if his eyes are blurred and stinging now. “I never told you everything either. You were fallen, like now… drunk or stoned most of the time, fucking anything that moved, and when I said jump, you asked how high. And I sent you into a nest of demons so I could get my shot at killing the devil.”

His voice sounds strangely loud in the peace and quiet of the cemetery, and Castiel is staring fixedly back, silent, solemn, and utterly still.

“You were cannon fodder, a diversion,” Dean mutters. “You were my only friend, the only one who meant anything to me anymore. I loved you, and I didn’t even blink about sending you to die. And you didn’t blink about going, and I think you knew what the deal was, I could see it in your eyes. You were scared. And you still went, for me. And you died, for me.” His throat is closing up, and his voice is harsh now. “I’m not sending you out to die for me here too.”

Castiel doesn’t shift his gaze. “Life,” he murmurs, “can be – _stifling_.”

It’s a loaded statement, and Dean clenches his hands into fists. “But you know where you’ll end up,” he tries. “It might be a one-way trip this time.”

There’s a long pause as the other man still stares back at him, and it’s a complicated, heavy look. “Be that as it may,” Castiel says eventually. “I never left you before, and I’m not leaving you now.” His eyebrows rise slightly, and he’s emphatic. “You know I can’t do this without you. Nor do I want to. This is my choice. My own free will.”

Dean reaches a restless hand up, scrubs at his head, and scowls. “For God’s sake,” he grates out, exasperated. “You both die. Don’t you get it? All roads lead to Rome. This may not be exactly what Zachariah showed me, but if you stay, you’ll die. I meant what I said. I won’t have time to stop and pick you up if you fall. Fuck it, I may not even  _notice_  if you fall. Both of you will die here.” He lapses into mute seething, strumming the air now with angry fingers.

Castiel is undeterred. “Then we should prepare to flunk most heinously,” he replies amiably, airquotes and all. “Although I do think we should retain some degree of optimism. After all, Michael is to Lucifer as Justin Timberlake is to Justin Bieber.”

Dean goggles at him, derailed for a moment. “Dammit, Cas, you’re going to say the C word aren’t you?”

Castiel grins wryly. “Bieber may top the charts at present, but it’s Timberlake we’ll all still be humming a decade from now. According to Crowley.”

Bobby moves to stand next to him, so he’s shoulder to shoulder with the younger man, and he shrugs, rolls his eyes over at Dean. “I have no idea who he’s talking about,” he remarks. “But I got balls of steel, you should know that by now. So I’m staying too.”

And fuck, Dean thinks, before at a time like this he’d have set sail along the river denial, mainlined coffee, scarfed down all the pie on the menu at the nearest diner, or maybe – no, _definitely_  – climbed inside a bottle, but none of it will hit the spot anymore. And so he opens himself up to it, the reassurance of company,  _support_. None of them will die alone, at least. He can’t help the swell of gratitude and he lets it seep through him, ease his tension. And his tranquility brings him back to clarity, his  _task_ , and he heaves out a sigh, feels suddenly, utterly, calm. “The eclipse will last longer than normal,” he says. “As long as it takes to put him down. You’ll need to be careful if you’re sticking around.”

“But a solar eclipse should only last seven minutes tops,” Bobby offers. “The moon should keep moving. It can’t just stop.”

“It stops today,” Dean says quietly. “This is the day of the dead sun. It’ll last a damn sight longer than seven minutes, so don’t look directly at it, no matter what, even with your sunglasses on. It’ll damage your eyes, even if the sun’s covered and you’re just seeing the corona… and if you look at the diamond ring, you’ll be blinded.”

Bobby nods as he takes it in. “Duly noted. So… like I said. How do we get him here?” He tugs at his beard. “I take it he isn’t going to show up to his own execution willingly.”

Dean drifts his focus over to the truck for a moment, and he can just about pick out his brother’s head wedged up against the window. He considers, clears his throat. “He’ll come,” he says. “I have what he wants. All I need to do is dangle it under his nose and he’ll show.”

Bobby’s face flushes as he makes the connection, and his mouth goes thin and pissed off. “Is that what you meant when you said you needed Sam here for this?” he sputters out hotly. “You’re going to stake your brother out for him? Are you sure that’s wise? Because I think it’s stupid.”

Dean almost expects the old man’s fists to come up and he braces himself, sets his jaw. “It isn’t stupid, it’s strategy,” he says crisply. “And it’s necessary. And if you’d let me beam you out of here like I wanted to, we wouldn’t even be discussing it.” He stares Bobby down with eyes he knows have gone cold and hard, and he doesn’t waver for an instant.

Bobby’s eyebrows shoot up. “What do you think of this plan?” he barks over at Castiel.

Castiel tilts his head, thoughtful, as Dean watches. And Dean knows Castiel is his, that Castiel won’t be in any way conflicted about this, that Castiel will choose him every damn time.

“I think it makes perfect sense,” Castiel says finally. “You can’t set a trap without bait. Unfortunately.”

Bobby scowls. “Well, you excel at fuckin’ loyalty, don’t you,” he mutters sourly. He ignores Castiel’s aggrieved look, directs his ire back at Dean. “Have you asked your brother what he thinks? He might have—”

“I’ll do it.”

Dean swivels a startled gaze in unison with Bobby, and Sam is leaning up against the truck, weary looking, hair wild, watching them with earnest eyes.

“I’ll do it,” he says again, and he sounds purposeful, maybe even hopeful. “It makes perfect sense. It can work.”

***

Dean doesn’t say anything as he trickles the oil around Sam and Castiel, and once he’s done he stomps away moodily and spends a few moments staring at the heavens, stony faced.

“Are you sure this can work?” Sam asks urgently, once his brother is out of earshot.

“Well no, I’m not sure,” Castiel says offhandedly, as if success hadn’t even occurred to him. “I’m hopeful,” he muses, scratching at his head. “Hopeful this has been adequately thought through by someone smarter than we are. But I wouldn’t say I’m confident.”

Sam can’t help himself, he pulls out a bitchface. “Well, can you  _try_  being confident?” he hisses. “You know, for  _me_?”

Castiel inspects him for a second, his expression perplexed, before his eyes brighten. “Oh,” he announces knowingly. “I see. Well then.” He smiles reassuringly. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind this will work, Sam,” he continues smoothly, without missing a beat. “We’re safe inside the circle of fire. Lucifer can’t cross it, he can’t break it from outside if Michael created it, and we’re not leaving it until it’s time. I have the Colt to open the gate, and you have the rings.” He breaks off briefly, glances over at Dean. “Michael will wear Lucifer down and overcome him, I’ll leave the circle and open the gate, and you’ll say the magic words and use the rings to bind Lucifer to the cage. And back to Hell Lucifer will go. Forever and ever, amen.” He nods. “How can it possibly fail? Especially with Bobby in the truck for back up if we need it.”

Sam scowls again, looks over and tracks his brother’s line of sight, and it looks grimy up there above the treetops, swirling clouds bruised purplish-black. It’s as if the sky is bleeding internally, and it makes him shiver with dread because it reminds him of all the bodies he’s seen, makes him think of Dean’s body, lividity setting in as gravity dragged his blood cells down. He wonders if it might be a bad omen but he tells himself it’s just the eclipse.

Dean is over by the truck now, conferring with Bobby, their heads close together. The old man rubs hard at the back of his neck and passes a hand across his eyes as Dean turns, and Sam sees him reach out abruptly, swing Dean around into a brief, fierce embrace before pulling back and planting his hands on Dean’s cheeks, leaning close and talking steadily to him.

Sam switches his gaze away from the private moment, glances across at the gravesite, and he shivers as he remembers the last time they were here. “I guess we’ll be letting a lot of demons out when we open the gate,” he muses.

“It’ll be significantly fewer than the legions Lucifer will call forth if he has dominion over the Earth, Sam,” Castiel replies grandly. He pauses then, casts his eyes over at Sam, elbows him in the ribs gently. “You and your brother will have much work to do after this is over,” he says quietly. “It doesn’t end here, Sam. Do you hear me? It goes on.”

Sam smiles weakly. “Yeah. But first we’re taking some personal time, doing the Grand Canyon. The demons can wait a few days.”

He pushes back onto his feet as Dean approaches, reaches a hand down to help heave Castiel up after him. He can feel the wind getting up, and the sky suddenly deepens a shade. The darkness seems to settle around them, melancholy and claustrophobic, and when Sam chances a split-second squint up at the sun it’s a rapidly narrowing crescent, still oddly bright despite the moon closing in.

Dean stands in front of them, looks from one of them to the other. His fingertips are dancing feverishly around the seams of his jeans, and he seems about to jump out of his skin. His eyes are shimmering bright and brilliant. He’s ready, Sam realizes, and it’s almost with a jolt of surprise at the thought that it’s finally here, that the time is  _now_ , that the hushed sense of expectancy that took hold of them all after he stepped out of the truck is ending.

“Okay,” Dean says, with a calm that belies his obvious tension. “We’re go on this.” He flicks his gaze to the Colt in Castiel’s hand. “You shove that right in there, Cas, when the time comes. And then you get out of the way. There will be no heroics…” He trails off, raises a hand and puts it firm on Castiel’s shoulder. “Look at me, Cas,” he says quietly. “Do I make myself clear?”

“As crystal,” Castiel replies obediently. “There will be no heroics.” He swallows. “Dean, I…”

“I know.” Dean nods as his eyes go masked and faraway. “I know, Cas. Just – be careful.”

He looks right at Sam then. “You too, Sam,” he says, and he smiles. “Sammy…” He exhales softly. “I meant what I said. No heroics. I have to get him down here, so we can use the rings, but he has to think he can win this too. He’s fighting to the death and that’s his advantage. I’m not… I’m pulling my punches in this, and that makes it harder for me. But you stay in the circle, no matter what happens, no matter what he does or says… no matter what I do or say too.” His attention is unwavering on Sam’s face. “And afterwards…” He curls his lips up in his familiar crooked, shit-eating grin. “There’s one point three million dollars in small bills all boxed up at Bobby’s. You might need it if this goes ass over tip. There won’t be any credit post-apocalypse. But spend it wisely, huh? None of that emo-crap music of yours.”

Sam flaps his lips for a second, taken aback despite his own mounting anxiety. “Wait a minute, where did—”

“Zachariah’s vessel had a couple of shady offshore accounts and no surviving relatives,” Dean smirks. “Remember, for a while there I knew everything.” His expression falls somber again. “You have the rings. Now, are you ready to do this?”

Sam keeps his voice steady. “I am.”

Dean nods slowly. “Brace yourself.”

He reaches out, presses his palm to Sam’s chest, and Sam feels a throb of discomfort that has him sucking in. And almost instantaneously he smells ozone, senses a snap in the air that wasn’t there before, and the atmosphere is suddenly sharply aware, alert and listening. He feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, but he doesn’t look beyond his brother’s eyes, not yet.

“See you on the flipside, Sammy.”

Dean winks, backs away a few steps, waves a hand vaguely, in the direction of Sam’s boots, and the oil lights up. And then Sam flits his eyes over to where Lucifer is leaning his half-brother’s gangling frame against a gravestone ten feet away, studying him with Adam’s eyes.

“Hey Sam,” he acknowledges affably. “Sure I can’t persuade you? Believe me, you’ll enjoy Armageddon much more with me wearing you. I’ll even let you keep your brother. Not the abomination, though.”

Sam senses Castiel bristling hostility beside him as he looks back to Dean, and his mouth goes dry as the Sahara as Dean’s face sets, his eyes suddenly glowing with an _otherness_  that sends a delicious chill tingling up Sam’s spine. The thrill is wonderful and fearsome all at once, and Sam can’t bear to stare at Dean but he can’t help it either, can’t help being dazzled by his brother even while he wants to run screaming from him in sheer terror because now he can see what he thought was tension for what it really is: pent-up power, because Dean is eager for this, thirsty for it, craving it.

Dean isn’t even really looking at Sam anymore, he’s looking through him, and he turns slowly, hands on his hips. As he does, Sam can feel Castiel lurch against him, can feel the other man’s wiry frame shaking like a leaf as he whispers, _Michael_ , and Sam glances down to see him entranced, eyes shining avidly and face beatific as he watches, before Sam drags his own gaze back to Dean, no,  _Michael_ , he corrects himself, poised there, ready to pounce.

“Lucifer,” Michael drawls. “Come to snuff the rooster? It isn’t happening.”

Lucifer raises an eyebrow. “You’ve seen what happens, Michael,” he says reasonably. “It’s predetermined. Inevitable. I win. In fact…” He smirks at Sam. “We win, Sam. You and me together, because I’ll be wearing my best suit at the victory dance.” He pushes up off the granite monument, takes a few steps forward, shakes his head sympathetically. “The here and now is meaningless, Michael. It won’t change the future. But you can be part of it. My offer is still there… all you have to do is choose me.”

There’s a long moment where Michael seems to ponder Lucifer’s words. “You’re wrong, Lucifer,” he murmurs then, and his cadence is dreamy, almost hypnotic. “Only the present moment really matters. Because the past can’t be changed, and the future is unknown.” And then his voice comes out sharp and decisive. “I choose them. They have more potential.”

The wind gusts suddenly, there’s a flurry of raindrops, and Sam becomes aware of thunder rumbling ominously overhead, sees the flash of lightning in his peripheral vision. And as he watches, Dean flickers, becomes less substantial in front of his eyes, and it’s as if his brother isn’t solid any more, as if he isn’t flesh any more, it’s as if he’s the promise, the threat, the spirit of the storm that approaches.

Dean snaps out of existence in the same second Lucifer does, and then time stops crawling along in slow motion and starts to race along at breakneck pace, out of control. All Sam hears is noise, the wind howling dismally, thunder clapping dangerously. Rain and hail pelt his cheeks as it goes dark, and the ground undulates and quivers underneath him. He can’t help glancing up again, winces as he sees a fraction of a second’s glimpse of the forbidding black disk of the moon concealing the sun, outlined now by the brilliant glow of the sun’s corona, and its flash scalds his eyes before Castiel drags his head down. 

“It’s happening,” Castiel hollers redundantly, over the racket, right up into Sam’s face, and his eyes are huge and terrified. “Don’t look at it. We have to be ready. Get down low, or you’ll fall across the flames.”

And Sam nods, spits out a stinging squall of ice pellets, throws his hands out for balance as Castiel crashes into him, and fists the other man’s clothes as they drop to the dirt. The ground rocks and judders so violently it bounces them up and down like peas on a drum, and all around them gravestones pogo up and down in a macabre dance.

***

Michael has been keeping an eye on the sun since he woke, watching as the tiny nick in its circle became a sizeable chunk, the sky grew more and more dull, and the light diminished, retreating to leave a gunmetal gray cast to the day. It’s less than fifteen minutes till totality when he erases the sigils from Sam’s ribs, and the sky is indigo by then.

He doesn’t feel the storm that blows up around them, doesn’t feel the force of the hail or hear the rumble of thunder. He rises up into dark, amorphous cloud, and he looks down to see sickly yellowish twilight beneath. He zooms higher, to where the sun is now a blazing crescent in the far reaches of space, and vanishing fast. He can see Venus and Mercury as gleaming pinpricks against the brightness, tens of millions of miles away, and on his other side is the moon, ghostly and opalescent as a giant pearl in the sky.

He rips through the air in pursuit, eating up the miles, maneuvering deftly, twisting and turning, circling and soaring, moves in between the moon and the sun, marvels at solar flares that burst out from the pulsing blood-red orb as it releases the magnetic energy stored in its corona, and at its fiery filaments and prominences.

And then Lucifer is there, sword flashing silver, and Michael doesn’t hesitate, he dives in, delivers a barrage of blows that have his brother spiraling, streaked with blood and damp with sweat, before Lucifer bullets back into the zone and turns on him with blazing, furious eyes.

“That was rude, Michael,” he snaps. “And I punish discourtesy wherever I find it.”

“Killing our brother was rude,” Michael hisses. “It really pissed me off.”

He streaks in again, collision force, hews, chops, and carves like the butcher Alastair taught him to be. And sparks fly and injured grace flashes its trauma as they dance the same dance as before, each charging in to assail the other, ducking and weaving, swooping and climbing, and Lucifer feints and dodges Michael’s endless volley of cuts, jabs and swats, before Michael strikes home and Lucifer falls to earth.

***

The endgame blares violently around them, a loop of crashing, rending noises and howling wind, and the ground is still vibrating and turbulent. Sam squints out past the flames, vaguely sees the truck leaping up and down on its wheels and Bobby falling out of it, and the earth splits, a yawning fissure opening up between them and the old man.

Castiel is gesturing frantically at Bobby, shouting to be heard over the din. He grabs Sam then, shakes him, raises his other hand and points. “Look! Sam, look!”

And there his brother is, Lucifer too, at the center of a whirling vortex of torrential rain, illuminated by the electricity lighting up the sky, and they’re circling each other slowly, before rushing in for a cascade of strokes too fast for Sam’s eyes to follow. He peers at them through darkness lit up by strobing, jagged lightning, and three bolts explode simultaneously in three separate spots twenty feet away. Trees creak, quiver and leap free of their moorings, slamming to earth, their roots throwing up a shower of soil, clods of earth and stones that bombard them.

They crouch, heads covered, in the face of the hurricane-force rage detonating around them, and after the rain of debris stops, Castiel shoots bolt upright. “Get back in the truck,” he yells over in Bobby’s direction, waving wildly.

Sam is wiping dirt from his eyes, sees Bobby gesticulate frantically in return and then start to move closer to the fight as he tries to navigate around the chasm. “What the fuck are you doing?” Sam bellows himself, and he can feel his throat go raw as he does, thinks his voice might have shredded his larynx with its force. Both he and Castiel are waving now, and Sam sees Michael glance over his shoulder, in the direction they’re pointing. He raises a hand and brings it down, almost casually, and an earsplitting screech sounds as a tree uproots and crashes to earth, concealing the old man from sight. Sam hollers out uselessly, and his cries toss and tumble faintly on the wind, carried away into the ether.

Castiel turns back, his face drawn, and he shoves soaking wet hair out of his eyes. “I don’t think it hit him,” he shouts. “I think Michael was just keeping him away. He needs to keep clear, or Lucifer will use him to bait Michael.”

Sam nods, swallows down his horror, swivels back to the spectacle, and his focus is glued to his brother. Adrenaline is skipping through his system, his heart is pounding a tattoo in his chest, and he can’t believe the force, the speed, the viciousness of the fight.

Dean,  _Michael_ , Sam reminds himself, is moving with disciplined, practiced ease, and smooth, feral grace as he swings the sword precisely and economically, ducks, jumps, whirls nimbly, twists out of reach as Lucifer strikes with intent to vivisect him. Michael’s face is spattered with blood spray, and he’s smiling, and when Sam catches sight of his eyes they’re gleaming eerily. Lucifer is creasing Adam’s features up in shock and anger at the onslaught, and he puts his blade up parallel to the ground to block a vertical cut from Michael, immediately moves into a horizontal slash of his own. Michael moves his weapon to the left, parries the blow confidently, swings back to swipe down aggressively on the diagonal. The edge describes a neat, sparking cut across Lucifer’s thigh, and the devil howls out his ire.

Castiel is tugging on Sam’s sleeve, leans in. “He’s herding him. Soon it will be time.”

It’s almost as if the combatants heard him, because it moves up a league, and Sam feels his jaw drop as it becomes frenzied, and it’s fucking awesome but at the same time his insides drop down through the ground, and he grabs Castiel, pulls him close and hollers in his ear. “This looks too serious, Cas, it looks like Dean’s really going for it.”

Metal clashes and sparks against metal in the light cast by the circle of flames, as Michael smashes down, throws his hand out for balance, sweeps across and up to exert a barely controlled swipe towards Lucifer’s neck. Lucifer ducks under the blade as it arcs, springs to the left and brings his own strike bulleting down, and it’s Michael’s turn to run under the blade. They both charge in simultaneously then, and Lucifer flails his blade up. Sam hears his brother yell out in pain, has to blink and smack a hand up to cover his eyes as Michael’s whole body glows incandescent.

“Grace,” Castiel shouts. “The swords – they cut deep, they weaken us. That’s the only reason we can see them at all.” He chances a glance up, sheltering his vision with his hand held in mock salute over his brow, and Sam remembers that Castiel said he still had freakishly acute senses. He leans close to Sam again, and his eyes are even more anxious. “Totality,” he says. “It’s almost time…”

***

Michael is focused, intent, ignoring everything but this fight. He finds himself on the receiving end of an offensive volley that has him falling back, and he overbalances, feels his legs trip out from beneath him. Lucifer’s blade strikes down, slicing a chunk out of his side as he narrowly avoids being disemboweled. He cries out at its burn, and feels himself weaken in response, rolling desperately as Lucifer recovers and takes aim again. This time the sword misses him completely, scything through a moss covered stone cross and cleaving it in two as Michael surges up halfway and counts coup himself, seeing a red line blossom on his brother’s shirt. 

He leaps to his feet, stabs again and is held off, and his brother vanishes then, reappears right behind him, hooks his arm up under Michael’s chin in a choke hold. Michael slams his head backwards into Lucifer’s face, bends swiftly, brings Lucifer over and slams him down. Lucifer thrashes wildly as he topples, grabs Michael’s wrist and brings him crashing down on top of him, and they roll over and over on the ground, each gripping tight to the other’s sword arm until they break apart and roll to their feet.

Their blades are still flashing, and Michael yelps as Lucifer slashes at him once, twice, and he catches sight of blood welling from his shoulder in a scarlet bubble before it starts to ooze sluggishly. He lunges in response, thrusts in, finds his blade met and held again, and Lucifer curses in the ancient language.

“You’ll pay for that.”

Michael grits his teeth. “Less talking,” he taunts. “More fighting.”

He attacks again, drops below Lucifer’s guard, gets in under his blade, knows the satisfaction of contact and sees blood spurt as he gouges a jagged cut across his brother’s hip. He snatches an instant to look up then, sees the last rays of sunlight breaking apart into individual points of intense white light, until only one luminous bead remains, the diamond ring effect that heralds totality.

Urgency thrums inside him like his own heartbeat.  _It’s almost time_ , he thinks.

***

The duel is taking its toll, both Michael and Lucifer slowing down perceptibly, and there’s no finesse now, only attrition and brute force. They break apart and circle each other again, stiff-legged and wary, both of them dripping gouts of blood, and Sam can hear them panting out harsh, uneven breaths. He grips Castiel by the upper arm, pulls him close. “We need to end this,” he yells over the shrieking wind.

The other man shakes his head, his eyes bleak. “We have to wait for his word.”

Michael feints and runs around behind Lucifer, kicks at the back of his knees, and Lucifer crashes down, shoots his leg out, tumbling Michael down onto his back beside him. Michael heaves himself wearily onto all fours, and Lucifer kicks up into his belly, lifting him several feet off the ground and sending him twisting onto his back again. Lucifer surges up, lunges while he’s still on his knees, brings the blade down hard and fast. Sam cries out in horror, chokes it off as Michael scoots up onto his ass and delivers a crunching backhand to Lucifer’s face. They grapple lethargically, grunting with the effort, straining out blows, fists landing home with bone-cracking impact until Lucifer crabs out of the way.

Michael struggles to his feet, swaying, his sword hanging limply as Lucifer pushes up too. Sam can see they’re pausing to take each other’s measure, and as they do the wind drops down to a sinister, far-off moan. Michael touches his hand across his lips to wipe away blood. He looks at Lucifer, but his words are for Sam and Castiel.

“It’s time,” he announces icily.

Lucifer snorts derisively. “You’re not the boss of me, Michael.”

And they stumble in to meet each other again.

***

Castiel doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t say anything, he springs to his feet and darts agilely through the flames, sprinting to the mausoleum and ramming the colt home. He steps back, glancing over his shoulder at Sam and nodding before he ducks down and moves swiftly to the left, out of sight.

Sam can already hear the low rumbling, grinding and clanking as the gate opens. He stares down at the rings in his hand, and then he looks up at the exhausted fighters and says the words, guttural Enochian phrases inscribed into the surface of each metal circle. As the last syllable passes his lips, the weather stops abruptly, the din dying away into silence.

The rings start to glow and quiver on Sam’s palm. And then they snap together as if magnetized, and he can feel their heat searing his skin.

***

The weight of the sword is unbearable in Michael’s hand now, and he feels exhausted, feels sharp, sickening pain spasm through screaming muscles. He meets his brother’s gaze through a red curtain swimming hazily over his eyes, and he vaguely realizes it’s his own blood. He can see past Lucifer, see the gaping maw of the Hellgate, smell sulfur, and he advances on Lucifer wearily, raises his blade, and the movement is labored.

“Don’t waste your breath begging for mercy,” Lucifer pants out weakly as he readies himself.

“You’re going down,” Michael grates out, and he sees his brother crease his brow, confused. He forces a smile. “Literally.” And he can see it dawn in Lucifer’s eyes then, see his brother’s nostrils twitch as he scents the fetid air they both know so well, see him start to brace himself against the unseen force sucking him back to where he came from.

“You can’t send me back there,” he challenges fearfully. “Michael, don’t do this. I love you, don’t send me back there alone to—”

“It’s too late,” Michael cuts in, grimly exultant. He lets his sword fall to the ground, takes a step closer, holds his hands out palm up and softens his voice. “But you won’t be alone.”

And unbidden, his eyes drift across and down to where Castiel is crouched, gazing up at him, appalled.

***

Sam is flitting through the flames himself now, the rings so hot he can barely grasp them, and he strides closer, pulls back his hand and casts them at the devil. He hears his brother’s words, doesn’t really pay attention to them though, because his eyes are widening in horror as the sword drops harmlessly onto the dirt, leaving Dean defenseless.

It all eases back into the slow motion of before, as Lucifer cocks his head, the fear on his face transforming into comprehension and then a smile of twisted pleasure. He pulls his sword back, close to his side, bends at the knees, thrusts up, and Sam screams his brother’s name. And there’s a blur of movement from the side of the tomb, a shape streaking out.  _Castiel_ , and he slides to a halt midstride in front of Dean before any of them can react, and takes the blade square in the gut.

Sam knows abstractly that that’s it, that the weapon was rammed home with such force that even if Castiel isn’t making a sound the metal is piercing through skin, muscle, bone and vitals, tearing the other man apart inside as it skewers him, impaling Dean on its tip as it emerges. And they all freeze for a moment of utter silence that feels like an eternity to Sam, before he hears his brother cry out, sees him jolt and fold his frame in around Castiel with the impact.

“Looks like I got a two-fer,” Lucifer snarls in triumph. He reaches out a hand to Castiel’s shoulder, braces, hauls the sword back, and Sam can hear its slick, gruesome progress as it exits the wound.

Castiel’s legs buckle as Dean clings onto his body, and Dean wheezes out a strangled gasp of distress before he staggers back a couple of cautious, unsteady steps and sinks to his knees, the other man slipping from his arms, slack and lifeless.

Lucifer hooks his foot under Castiel, rolls him aside, gloats down at Dean. “Still want to keep me company, brother?” he sneers maliciously, and he’s reeling now, feet shuffling unwillingly backwards as black smoke starts wreathing out of the gate, demons breaking to freedom around their creator as his prison stakes its claim. He leans down, grips Dean’s upper arm to drag him along. 

Sam laughs harshly and Lucifer’s eyes snap up to meet his. “No he doesn’t,” Sam grates out through his boiling hot fury. “But I do.”

He launches himself, a full body tackle that slams him into Lucifer and sends them both tumbling over the edge. And Sam hangs in the air over the abyss for a split second until his fall is broken by a hand snatching at his, and he crashes into the brick sides of the tomb’s interior wall, legs hanging limply, Lucifer dangling precariously from his belt.

Sam’s weight hangs there in space, and he cranes his neck, looks past Lucifer and down into the fiery glow he remembers from before. The shaft extends as far as he can see, and he can smell the sickening stench of death and burning meat emanating from its depths, feel the heat on his cheeks. He looks up to where his brother’s hand is gripping fast to him, and his own fingers are digging into Dean’s wrist so fiercely he can’t feel his fingertips. It’s puny leverage and he knows it’s temporary too, because he remembers what Castiel said, knows the swords cut deep, knows the damage they do. There’s no mojo left for him, and he knows he outweighs his brother by a good twenty pounds even without the devil in the equation.

He can already feel the tendons and muscles in his shoulder stretching, hear the bone cracking, and he imagines it popping out of the socket. He scrabbles desperately at the wall with his toes, trying to find an indentation, a foothold. He blinks sweat-stinging eyes, stares up through hair plastered to his brow, to Dean’s stunned face gazing down at him.

Sam licks his lips to moisten them so he can speak past his terror. “I know you’re hurt, Dean,” he rasps out painfully. “I know you can’t hold on to me.”

Dean is trembling with the exertion, heaving frantically at Sam, making frenzied sounds of anguish and pain, his eyes wide, bruised with shock and fright. He’s slipping further over the lip of the drop himself, and Sam can’t have that. “Look at me,” Sam says. “Dean. Look at me. You have to let go, or you’ll fall too.”

“No,” Dean objects hoarsely. “I can pull you up. I’m not letting go.”

Sam shakes his head. “Listen to me. Dean… I know you didn’t want Adam going down there.” He can see his brother is crying, and he’s squinting through the blur in his own eyes. “I don’t want you going back there either,” he says. “And you don’t have to worry about Adam… Adam isn’t going. I’m saying yes to him now, and you have to let go of me.” He smiles. “You promised.”

And Dean is shaking his head vehemently. “No. No. Sammy, no…” He closes his eyes and flops his face down into the dirt. “Don’t make me,” he chokes out. “Please don’t. Sam.” He makes a muffled, incomprehensible sound of combined effort and misery, and Sam can feel him digging his fingernails into his skin, because he’s slipping.

“Dean, look at me,” Sam says again. “It’s important.”

His brother lifts his head wearily, stoically, and his expression is dazed and disbelieving, his eyes red with regret, and tears track through the blood and mud on his face, leaving pale streaks in their wake. 

“I’m not innocent, Dean, but Adam is,” Sam whispers. “We can set him free. This is right… and this is my own free will, this isn’t any of that destiny crap.” He drags his gaze away then, looks down, stares into the rabid fury glowing out of his half-brother’s sunken eyes. “You still want me, you can have me,” he says, and he smiles mirthlessly. “What better revenge for us kicking your ass? The answer is yes.”

Almost instantaneously, Sam can feel it start to flash and burn into him, something ancient, and black, and skeletal, curling its talons into him, reaching for his soul and embracing it, caressing it lovingly, turning him to cold, hard ice inside. He struggles against it, groans out as it clutches victoriously at him, fights it for one more moment.

He looks up again. “I love you, Dean,” he says. “You’re my brother, in all the ways that matter. And all of it was real. Now let’s end this together. Let go of me. Please.”

“But you’ll burn,” Dean gasps out.

And Sam smiles through his tears. “Idiot,” he soothes gently. “The fall will probably kill me.”

He feels his skin start to slide, feels his brother’s grip loosen by increments, hears Dean sob out his name again. His vision clears, and he can see the sun starting to break out from behind the moon. It blazes golden red, and lights up the sky with its promise.

Dean lets go.

***

He weeps out his agony inarticulately as he rolls over and away, pounds his fist on the ground as he wills the gate closed. The pain in his gut is scorching, and the pain in his heart is stabbing and cruel. He’s shivering, his skin hot, tight, tingling and abrasive, and his mind feels scraped raw. He can smell his own sweat and blood, and ozone, sulfur, the  _Pit_ , on the air, knows abstractly that they are the last things he will ever smell. He can feel his heart beating erratically in his chest, counting down his life’s passing. He’s weary, and he wants to escape.

The light comes back slowly and the sun hangs free in the blue sky, warming him. His head lolls, and Castiel is lying a few feet away, motionless, his front stained crimson, his hand reaching out and his eyes staring at Michael, dreamy, glassy, unseeing eyes, deceptively peaceful because Michael knows where Castiel is. He rolls onto his front, biting back a cry, and he crawls as far as it takes to reach out his hand and tug at the blood-soaked hoodie. “Castiel,” he croaks. “Cas. No… _no_.”

He can feel power smoldering inside him, a slow, low-temperature controlled burn, embers that glow and sizzle along to a dull, distant roar, stifled energy and force that waits to explode and radiate outwards, vaporizing everything in its path. He smiles, pulls himself close enough to curl his body around Castiel, and rests his arm across his brother’s chest. He lays his hand on Castiel’s shoulder, presses his palm to the approximate location of the handprint he left there, and the contact hums and fizzes between them.

Something inside Michael breaks, and floods out of him, and he gasps at the beauty of the light as it shines, a beacon for where he ends and his brother begins. It’s hypnotic, has him spellbound, and it calms him.

“Please,” he whispers.

Michael lets go.

***

Dean thrashes and moans himself awake from flaming dreams, and wheezes out his hurt feebly. And someone is holding him close, rocking him, smoothing gentle fingers on his cheek, pressing tender lips to his brow, chanting a stream of comfort,  _DeanDeanDean_ , and it’s so damn familiar.

He cracks his eyes, stares hazily up into blue, furrows his brow. “Cas?” he breathes out. And then he freezes, panicked, because he feels empty inside, feels a familiar space in there, remembers how the power shone as it left him. He shrinks back. “Who are you?” he chokes out. “Are you  _him_?”

The other man tilts his head. “Dean,” he murmurs, and his eyes are sad, but he smiles at Dean like he’s the only thing that matters. “I am Castiel,” he says. “And I’m an angel of the Lord.”

***

Bobby’s leg is wedged under a heavy branch and he braces his other foot against it, pushes, feels sweat bead his brow and trickle down his face as he shoves with all his might, until he feels some give. He slides the limb out, falls back limply, laughs and wipes his eyes because he can still feel his legs, can still move them. And he whoops up at the blue sky, the sun, punches the air because it doesn’t look like Armageddon is raining down, and he knows in his heart that mean’s it’s over.

It takes him a while to crawl out from under the splintered branches and foliage, and he’s spitting out soil, moss and dead leaves as he does, and he has to take five, sit and regain his breath. His clothes are soaked and his cap is lost somewhere under the oak. He rolls over onto his butt, pushes up, glances across to his truck, and it’s split apart, a pile of torn and twisted metal. It looks like a crumpled tin can under the tree trunk, lying flat on its belly, tires flat to the ground.

Bobby spits. “Balls,” he grates out feelingly. “Still. Small price to pay.” The truck splits into two hazy images.  _Double vision_ , he thinks, and he suddenly realizes his head is splitting, and he feels nauseous. He holds up a finger, moves it slowly right, left, has to close his eyes and lean into his hand as his brain shimmies inside his skull. “Fuck it.”

The wind is whispering in the trees, and he can hear birds singing. The world is still here, and peaceful. They did it, he thinks. “They did it,” he croaks out loud, in awe and wonder. “Sonofabitch. They did it.” He sits and soaks it in, revels in it, despite his concussion and the fact he wants to hurl.

“Are you alright, Bobby?”

Bobby smiles, swivels his head around, wincing in discomfort as he does. “We did it. Goddammit, we—” He pulls up abruptly, swallows thickly. “Tell me… that he’s alive.”

Castiel stares at Bobby, and his hair is chaotic, his face pale, his eyes steely gray and shadowed. He has Dean cradled in his arms as easily as if he were carrying a child, Dean’s head flopped on his shoulder, arm swinging. “He’s alive,” he replies, in a dull, shellshocked monotone. “I fixed him. He didn’t want to be fixed, Bobby. He asked me to let him go. He doesn’t want to be alive. But I couldn’t let him go. So I fixed him.”

Bobby exhales sharply. “Okay.” He nods, purses his lips, focuses his mind, and ignores the growing sense of dread churning his belly. “Well. It’s good that you fixed him. It was the right thing to do. Boy never did know what was good for him.” He pushes up onto his knees, crawls back into the wreckage of the tree, looking back over his shoulder as he does. “My cap is under this mess somewhere,” he complains. “I ain’t breaking in another one, God knows it’s hard enough to find a good cap these days. I’m damned if I’m—”

“Bobby.”

“And as for the truck, sweet cheese on a cracker, that’s pretzeled. I’ll be lucky to get any parts from that pile of scrap. Wheels maybe. Even luckier to get our stuff out of the back, and if—”

“Bobby.”

He shoots upright, ignoring the pain that twinges up his leg, strums the air in his anger. “How the fuck are we even going to get out of here without wheels and carrying those two? It’s a three-mile hike to the main road, and they can’t walk.”

“Bobby. Sam didn’t make—”

“You shut your damn mouth,” Bobby cuts in bitterly. “I don’t want to hear that crap from you. It’s your usual bunch of fuckin’ lies.” He feels himself start to shake, feels his face go hot. “You obviously got your mojo back,” he barks out. “How the hell that happened, well I have no idea. Some jiggery fuckin’ pokery, no doubt. But how about you use it to think up a fuckin’ solution to this shambles? How about you use it to fix my truck? How about that? How about you use it to fix this?” He feels his legs go weak then, and they fold him gracelessly back down onto his ass in the dirt. “Fix this,” he mutters. “Fix this. For God’s sake.  _Fix this_.”

Castiel’s voice is quiet, infinitely patient, steeped in regret. “I can’t fix this, Bobby. And Dean needs you now.”

***

Dean wakes up in one piece and healthy, and he doesn’t remember how he got here, or what the date is or even what day of the week it is. He feels empty because part of him is gone. He feels trapped in his skin, feels  _earthbound_.

He doesn’t really talk. He hears though, muffled sounds from far away. He can hear the low rumble of quiet conversation as Bobby sits in a huddle with Castiel, pouring his heart out and asking  _what the hell happened?_ over and over and over again, hear Castiel tell him he doesn’t really know, that he was distracted, over and over and over again, until he gives in and tells Bobby what he did.

And Dean sees Bobby lift up his hand and put it on the angel’s shoulder for a minute, before he reaches up and pats him on the cheek. “You did good, son,” the old man rasps out.

Castiel nods hesitantly, and Dean wonders if Bobby will say the same thing to him when he finds out what he did.

He screams himself to a dazed halfway state between awake and asleep in the small hours of every morning and Castiel is always there, gripping his hand. And he leans across from the chair and says, “Go back to sleep, Dean,” and touches his fingertips gently to Dean’s brow.

***

The first day Dean wakes up properly he shuffles mechanically around the room in his bare feet and shorts, setting Sam’s gear out on the other bed, parking his gigantic sneakers over in the corner, stowing his duffel in the closet. He keeps Sam’s stuff all neat for his brother, the way Sam likes it. He doesn’t eat unless Bobby makes him, doesn’t wash, sleeps in his clothes. He’s vaguely aware he stinks, but now he’s up and at it he can’t afford the distraction of meals, showers, laundry, can’t let himself be sidetracked from his job of standing watch.

Inertia makes his limbs heavy as he stumbles out to the porch swing at about nine thirty every morning, to watch the trail that leads up to Bobby’s house from the highway. He stares at the gate, doesn’t blink very often, and his eyes feel gritty and crusty, and they burn with the dryness. He feels empty, exhausted, weak, tight in his throat with the sense of expectation, anticipation,  _any minute now_.  He doesn’t even look at the sky, even though there are times when he still yearns to fall into it.

Sometimes he hears footsteps and feels a nudge on his shoulder, and sometimes he catches a glimpse, a shadow, and he rolls his eyes because Sammy must have snuck in that one time he dipped his head in his hand and shuddered out some feeling he doesn’t understand,  _grief, but why, because everything’s fine_. And he knows, just knows, that if he turns his head it’ll be okay again. But when he turns, there’s no one there. One time the silence is broken by Sam speaking right in his ear,  _Dean, Jesus. Get a grip_. And he feels light, feels a flood of relief and joy, and then he realizes it’s Bobby, gruff tones telling him he isn’t going crazy, that what he’s feeling is normal.

“I know you don’t want to accept this, Dean,” the old man says gently. “And God knows, we both know that feeling, from before. But you have to accept it. You have to face it, so you can let go. Move on. It isn’t going to go away if you ignore it, son.”

Bobby is tenacious, sits next to him for hours, and every now and then he puts his hands up to wipe at his eyes, and he breathes faster, and Dean can feel the old man’s shoulders shaking next to him. And Dean sits rigid and tense, his head throbbing dully and his heart racing, his whole body aching with something he can’t name, and he can feel his fingers dig into his thighs,  _fingers digging in but slowly slipping_. But Dean isn’t letting go because Sam isn’t gone, he’s right there, and if Dean can just turn his head fast enough before his brother hides, he’ll catch him out, and the game will be up.

 _What the fuck do you know old man_ , he thinks.  _He’s coming back. He’s on his way_.

***

Castiel sits with him when Bobby doesn’t, oddly boyish in his new uniform of tee shirt and jeans, and Dean hasn’t a clue why he sticks around, thinks he should have better things to do now he has his mojo back. But whatever, those are the times when Dean feels his body go soft and pliant and there’s a strange peace and tranquility to it, the  _waiting_ , because the angel has this Zen-like calm about him, always has had, and it’s like it bleeds into Dean from where their shoulders and legs brush together. He wonders listlessly if Cas is Obi-Waning him.

“I’m not going to tell you it’ll all be alright, Dean,” Cas says gently, just one time and one time only. “But you can talk to me. You can tell me what happened. You can tell me how it makes you feel. You can blame me. I’ll wait until you’re ready, and I’ll be here when you are.”

And Castiel is as good as his word, and he waits. And sometimes Dean knows he leans closer and soaks up that warmth, and sometimes he knows he’s a little bit in love with the angel, and sometimes he even drifts off into a sort of trance on Castiel’s shoulder, his eyes still glued to the road.

But he doesn’t tell Castiel anything because some rational part of his mind knows how it works, that if he tells Castiel how it went down,  _how what went down?_ , it means accepting that it happened,  _but nothing happened_ , and that means he’ll get used to it, get on with his life, care less and less as time passes. And it’s all grade A bullshit, because  _it never happened_. Sam just got held up along the road somewhere, and any minute now,  _any fucking minute now_ , the Impala will turn in off the highway,  _but the Impala is parked up behind Bobby’s_ , and Sam will clunk the door open and show Dean his blackest and most sullen bitchface, because he ran out of gas on the drive.

So he watches the gate, off there in the near distance, and on day  _whatever_ , with Castiel sitting there next to him as the long, lazy afternoon closes into dusk, he puts two and two together and it finally hits him why the Impala isn’t turning in off the road with Sam at the wheel.

He pushes slowly upright. “I know what to do, Cas,” he says hoarsely, because he hasn’t used his voice in he doesn’t know how long, and the last time he did he screamed so hard it cracked and broke. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

He shuffles down the steps off the porch, unsteady because he’s weary, out of condition, starved and lightheaded with hunger. He’s aware of Castiel trailing along in his wake, saying nothing but sharply observant as he always is.

Bobby is out back, tinkering on an old Ford pickup, and he straightens up, regards Dean with an alarmed expression, flicks his eyes away and behind to Castiel and widens them in a question before he looks back. “Dean,” he says uncertainly. “What are you doing, son?”

Dean doesn’t pause, stumbles past the old man, hefts a crowbar from a strewn collection of tools. “Problem-solving,” he husks out, and he twists awkwardly, trots clumsily towards her. He sighs out as he studies her, trails a fingertip along her side. And then he lets rip, laying the metal into her, smashing, slamming it down, and glass sprays up into his face.

He can hear shouting as he beats her to death, and there’s something familiar about doing this but at least this time he has a purpose. He doesn’t stop, and it’s cold, calculated homicide, and she doesn’t fight back. It’s like she knows, knows what this is, and she sits there and takes it until she breathes her last and she’s unrecognizable, dented, broken, bruised and cut. He stops, and he steps back, and he’s soaked with sweat, drained and gasping with the effort, but it’s done.

He laughs, reels around and stares into Bobby’s horrified face, and the old man is ashen, crying fat, wet tears and wringing his hands. “What?” Dean says, unrepentant. “It’s fine, Bobby, don’t panic…” He gets his voice under control, brings it back to a lower pitch, holds out a placating hand. “It’s fine,” he reassures. “Don’t you get it? She was stopping him from coming back.”

The old man whispers, “But he isn’t coming back, son.”

And Dean snorts. “You’re wrong,” he says decisively. “I’ve been sitting out there on the porch, watching the gate for days, watching out for her. But she’s been here all along, stopping him from coming back.”

Bobby is still staring at him with shocked, desolate eyes, and he’s shaking his head.

“Jesus, Bobby, tell me you get it,” Dean snaps impatiently. “Come on. Sam needs wheels. How will he get here without her? He won’t, see? Her being here is what’s stopping him driving her through the gate, like I’ve been waiting on. Now, she’s gone. So. Problem solved.” He feels his face split in a smile. “It’s going to be alright.” He shifts his eyes to Castiel. “You get it Cas, don’t you?” he says hopefully.

And Castiel stares back at him too, holds his gaze unblinkingly. He’s waiting.

Dean tells himself that he’s calm, rolls his eyes at their  _sheer fuckin’ intransigence_. That’s what he does on the inside, but on the outside he achieves critical mass and shatters into jagged, glittering, brittle shards. “Where is the fuckin’ evidence?” he hears himself holler. “Where is the body? Show me the fuckin’ body, and then I’ll believe it. You lying fuckin’ bastards. And you…” He stabs a finger at Castiel. “You’ve been there,” he scathes out. “You could get him out for me. Why the fuck haven’t you?”

Castiel frowns, confused for a second, before he sets his jaw and squares his shoulders. “Dean, it’s beyond my powers,” he says earnestly. “Lucifer’s cage is at the very deepest—”

Dean scythes a hand through the air, cuts in savagely. “Then we use the fuckin’ rings. Plan C.  Break it open, get him back up top where he should be, instead of—”

“No,” Castiel says firmly.

Dean pulls up, can’t comprehend the reply at all for a long, drawn-out moment, can’t comprehend his own response to it either, and he decides it’s disappointment because he doesn’t have a word to explain what he’s really feeling. It’s growing inside him though, restless and frantic, slithering around just under his skin, trying to find a way out. He puts a hand up to his brow, and his hand is shaking as he gropes for words. “No?” he echoes finally, through a throat gone thick and dry.

The angel glances over at Bobby, a meaningful look, like maybe the two of them have discussed this possibility, prepared for exactly this moment, for  _plan C_ , before he looks back uneasily. Dean can see he’s flexing and straightening his fingers as if he’s nervous, or as if he’s about to roundhouse his fist into Dean’s jaw as hard as he did in the alleyway in Cicero.

“The rings aren’t here, Dean,” Castiel continues. “They’re far away, and separate from each other. And if you used them to free Sam, you’d free Lucifer again too.” He shakes his head, and he gentles his voice, but there’s still a note of steely resolve underlying his words. “Dean… it’s likely Sam has given in to Lucifer by now. Would you want your brother’s body being used to destroy this world? While he’s trapped inside it, and aware? Would  _Sam_  want it?”

And Castiel doesn’t know what happened, doesn’t know Sam was already lost, and neither does Bobby, and Dean lurches forward on a surge of boiling guilt, swipes wild and uncoordinated. Castiel ducks adroitly, rises and snatches out viper-fast on the backswing, sealing his fingers around Dean’s wrist.

“Dean,” he says solemnly. He reaches up and takes the bar out of Dean’s hand, and his face is impassive, his stare measured, and he’s waiting again. “Dean…”

“I don’t want to be here,” Dean hisses viciously. “Why didn’t you let me die?”

Castiel flinches, barely, and then he tilts his head and his eyes soften. “Because your life has meaning, purpose, and value, Dean,” he answers, saying the words slowly, with due weight and consideration. “To me.”

The admission doesn’t dampen Dean’s anger, just ratchets it up even more, makes him want to explode in even more violent fury even if he knows he’s outmatched. “Fuck that,” he yells, right up in Castiel’s face. “Why the fuck couldn’t you just let me go? I asked you to let me go.” And now his throat is ravaged and smarting, and that suffocating feeling inside him is swelling in his chest so that it aches fiercely. He snarls it out again, bitter. “I asked you to let me go.”

The angel doesn’t even twitch this time, meets the hostility head on. “Yes, you asked me to let you go, Dean,” he concedes flatly. And he stops, shrugs his shoulders almost helplessly, and his eyes give him away like they always have. “But… that also is beyond my powers.”

There’s a sudden and horrifying déjà vu about Castiel’s words, and they pierce through the shield Dean has constructed around himself like a high-explosive antitank warhead, blindsiding him with their impact. He feels himself start to fray and unravel, feels the second his strings snap, and he punches his hand to his chest as his heart skids to a halt. He chokes back a scream and hears it come out as a low, broken moan, as his bones turn to mush and his knees give way. And Castiel steps in closer, catches him, heaves him up and pulls his head into his shoulder, wraps his arms around him tight, supports him, as they sink down together onto the dirt.

“I let my brother go,” Dean gasps out, into the worn-out cast-off tee his face is pressed up against, and he laughs out a breathless chuckle of appalled disbelief. “You couldn’t let me go, but I let Sam go. Jesus.”

And Castiel is hushing him, rocking him, and Dean suddenly finds that he isn’t laughing at all, that it isn’t amusing or ironic, that it hurts him so deeply and so unbearably that he wants to lie down and die from it all over again. He hoiks back snot, swallows it, and his face feels hot and his eyes are stinging and blurred with tears. “It all went to shit and I dropped my brother into Hell,” he mutters, and he sucks air in desperately.

Bobby is lowering his own butt down to the ground next to him, putting a steadying hand up to his back. “Dean, what are you talking about?” the old man asks, and he sounds dazed by it all. “I don’t follow you, boy.”

Dean sniffs, bites his lip. “I wasn’t going to let Adam go by himself,” he whispers. “Sam figured it out. He didn’t want me going back there. He jumped instead, and I caught him as he fell. I tried to pull him up but he said yes while he was hanging there, so Adam wouldn’t have to go.” He fists handfuls of the angel’s tee convulsively, feels Castiel’s embrace tighten even more, and he tries to hold himself together. “And I let go of him. I looked right into his eyes, and then I dropped my brother into Hell.”

His voice falters, trips over itself. “I can’t remember what day of the fuckin’ week Sammy died on, or the date,” he chokes out. “And I feel so lonely for him. I want him back. Every time I sleep I see him, and when I wake up I think it’s today, today is the day he’ll come back. And I keep watching out for the car. But the car is here, and he isn’t coming back is he?”

He feels Castiel exhale out a long sigh. “No, Dean,” the angel murmurs into his hair. “He isn’t coming back.”

Dean clears his throat. “I guess it’s time for me to stop watching out for him then.”

Bobby’s hand kneads his shoulder muscles, and Dean feels them start to relax, feels himself start to let go. “It’s time you stop watching out for him, boy,” Bobby says faintly. “It’s time you let him go. We’ve got you now. We’ve got you.”

***

The lack of Sam, the knowledge of where he is, what might be happening, is like being back in Hell, but worse than any torture Alastair could devise. And sometimes Dean just stops, wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, grinds to a halt mid-stride, and he stares into space and gulps and shakes. And then when he comes back to himself, Bobby or Castiel is steering him over to sit down like he’s some old guy of ninety in the local twilight home for the terminally bewildered, and they’re parking him in a chair where he’ll spend the rest of his days wasting away and forgetting all his memories as his gray matter disintegrates.

“What is the cage like?” he slurs to Castiel one night, midway through a fifth of Jack, because they’re letting him drink it out of his system when it gets really bad and sometimes when he’s had enough liquor the pins and needles of his loss turn into numbness, and it’s bearable. He lists over to lean on the angel’s shoulder, and it’s solid under his cheek, comfortable. “What is the cage like?” he asks again.

“Dean,” Castiel says quietly, regretfully. “Don’t do this, Dean.”

And Dean smiles, snickers drunkenly, because he has this image in his head of the cage, an impression he’s holding onto, the belief that maybe it isn’t as bad as he thinks. “Tell me it’s like that Frost-Nixon movie,” he snorts out. “Talking heads. Tell me Sammy’s down there just talking to Lu. Or it’s like the Tonight Show. Interviews. Larry King Live. But you know… they’re just –  _talking_. Getting to know each other. Sitting in rocking chairs on the porch, and having a beer and swapping stories. Cas. Cas.” He swallows thickly. “Please. Cas. I let him go. Please tell me he isn’t. That  _it_  isn’t – like Alastair.”

But Castiel won’t lie to him, and he shifts, eases himself out from under Dean and pushes up. “I should get you into bed.”

And Dean looks at him through slitty eyes. “You should be so lucky,” he leers pissily. “I’m not giving that up for you too.”

***

Castiel vanishes off the face of the earth after that and it makes Dean restless, and he walks endlessly around the house and then the lot, staring up as if he might see the angel peering down at him from a cloud.

And one morning, maybe week four, Dean wakes and finds that he wants to live, because that’s what Sam wanted him to do, and that the lack of Sam isn’t like being shredded in Hell, or like a nail in his testicles, or like root canal. The pain isn’t shrill and deafening anymore, it’s finding its level, settling into a dull, nagging ache. It’s like he has arthritis in his heart, and it slows him down and makes him less agile, and the discomfort makes him suck in a breath and wince from time to time, but it doesn’t make him want to scream in agony. It isn’t acute and terminal anymore, it’s chronic, something he can endure and survive, something he can get used to and coexist with.

He begins to see colors again, feel the breeze and the sun on his face when he’s outdoors. He eats food and tastes it again, and sometimes he forgets for whole minutes at a time. He packs up Sam’s stuff, puts it all in a cardboard box and stows it on the top shelf of one of Bobby’s closets, because the clothes won’t fit him or Bobby. Or Castiel, if the angel ever shows up again.

There are omens, Bobby tells him darkly, demonic activity everywhere. And the news from the East isn’t good, the cities laid low by an epidemic of sickness that takes the old and the young, and sometimes takes the in-between too, driving them crazy in the head and violent. Dean thinks of four years from the  _now_ , of the future Zachariah showed him, and he wonders if they really changed anything at all, but he can’t bring himself to care very much. “It’s far away from here,” he tells Bobby absently.

He strolls out to the Impala one day, thinks to maybe get her fixed up, but he looks at her remains and it isn’t the same. He takes a turn around the lot instead, finds an old Jeep that runs, gets the engine cleaned up and tuned, tells himself it’ll be more practical, get better mileage. Maybe it isn’t the same but it isn’t bad either, and he welds lockboxes underneath it and packs them with stacks of Zachariah’s ill-gotten gains.

On the day he leaves, he gives the old man a hug, watches him in the rearview mirror as he gets smaller and smaller. And then he feels it, the familiar electric charge and the waft of air on his right cheek as it shifts and displaces, and it’s like a weight off his shoulders.

They tool along in easy, companionable silence for a few minutes before Castiel speaks. “Are you alright, Dean?” he says, on his customary sigh.

 _I’m-glad-you’re-here-don’t-ever-leave-me-again_  is on the tip of Dean’s tongue, but he grunts noncommittally, purses his lips into an annoyed line and hopes Castiel isn’t doing his mind-reading trick. “Where the fuck have you been?” he grouches out petulantly.

“Upstairs,” Castiel replies.

He’s sufficiently gloomy to have Dean eyeing him speculatively, and he relents, offers a sympathetic ear. “Shitstorm, huh?”

The angel slumps, dejected, and when he slants his eyes at Dean his expression is bleak. “Heaven is in disarray,” he offers pensively. “With Michael –  _gone_  – Raphael goes unchecked.” He shudders. “Raphael… has it in for me. Since Maine.” He makes a low, frustrated sound, throws up his hands. “So yes. It’s a shitstorm of the highest magnitude. Category ten, in fact, and it isn’t safe there for me. I’m – Heaven’s most wanted.”

Dean ponders that. “So you’re still cut off, is what you’re saying.” He shakes his head, incredulous. “Jesus. Did we change a damn thing? Because I’m starting to wonder.” He gives the angel a calculated look. “Will you lose the mojo? Like before?”

Castiel exhales long and slow. “I don’t know for sure. It might be different this time. After all, this is grade A mojo.” He lapses into silence then, but he’s drumming his fingertips on his thigh, so Dean waits. “Why did you do it?” he asks eventually.

Dean fakes ignorance. “Do what?” he says blankly.

“You know what.” Castiel shoots him an exasperated look. “You ripped out your grace and gave it to me,” he continues haltingly. “And I remember what it was like to be without grace, how it felt… torn and jagged inside, like an open wound that wouldn’t heal.” His look softens then, into the old mix of fondness and fascination. “I don’t understand why you did that.”

Dean huffs out, and there’s a long moment where he runs through it in his mind, the joy, the feeling of peace, of being whole again for the first time, of being who he was meant to be. And hot on its heels comes the memory of being  _alone_  in the moments after the gate closed, and the horror of isolation. He shrugs carelessly. “It was never really mine to have,” he concludes awkwardly. It’s the abridged version, he knows, and he keeps his eyes fixed on the road, clears his throat. “It was yours. It’s what you were meant to be.”

Castiel raises decidedly skeptical eyebrows. “But it’s what you were meant to be too.” His tone goes pointed. “ _Michael_.”

Dean considers, drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Maybe it’s because I had thirty years without it, or maybe it’s because…” He trails off, doesn’t really want to say it even now, weeks on, doesn’t want to give voice to how the other loss will always be so much worse than the smooth, unfilled space at his core. “I’ll live,” he says instead. “And I couldn’t leave you down there.” He grimaces then, because he was never really good with words. “You, uh…  _matter_ ,” he fumbles out. “It’s like I said before… I don’t really know what this is with us, or where it’s going. But you matter to me. A lot. You know… all that meaning, purpose, value crap. I meant it. So it was the right thing to do, for both of us.” He pauses a beat, grins sort of. “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. Someone famous said that.”

Castiel appraises him some more, and it turns out he was reading Dean’s mind. “I won’t leave you again, Dean,” he observes dryly, but his eyes are liquid and his gaze is transparently affectionate. “And you are a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” He curls his lips up in his usual half-smile. “Someone famous said that too.”

Dean snorts. “Well, I’ve never been called that before.”

“You  _fell_  for me,” Castiel accuses mildly.

Dean thinks the angel might even sound a tad awestruck, and he grimaces, feels his cheeks heat up, focuses firmly on the road ahead. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

Castiel ignores the frost, and his reply is thoughtful. “It’s symmetry.”

“Well, that’s all it is,” Dean clips back testily. They’re coming to a stop sign, and he brakes gently to a halt, glances right, then left, down the long, deserted ribbon of highway.

Castiel shifts, makes himself comfortable, looks at Dean expectantly. “Where are we going?”

Dean smiles. “South west,” he says reflectively. “Arizona. There’s something I’d like to see there.” He makes the turn, floors it, and the Jeep roars satisfyingly.

“And then we’ve got work to do,” he murmurs.

***

  
 _  
  
Completes in the Coda  
  
_


	5. Coda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers up to S6; AU after Point of No Return

He smells antiseptic, hears the beep and whirr of monitors, and opens his eyes to clinical gray and white and a woman smiling down at him,  _hello Keith_. Blinking is an effort, so he closes his eyes and drifts back to sleep. 

***

He doesn’t recognize his name, and it sounds strange when they call him that. When he’s alert enough, he asks how he got there, and one of the nurses tells him a tree blew down on his truck three weeks ago, braining him so badly they thought he’d never wake. He’s one of the lucky ones, made it out the other side of a storm that wrecked a third of the state and killed more than three hundred people. He’s in one piece, except for his memory being like a blank slate. All he had on him when he was brought in was his wallet, the nurse trills, and isn’t it lucky he had his insurance card in there? No emergency contact information, and no next of kin details listed on his insurance policy.

They give him the wallet and his clothes when he discharges himself against medical advice two days later. He walks the two miles to Bob’s Towing and Auto Repair, and as he squints up at the sign he thinks maybe it should be familiar to him. They show him his truck, but the crumpled metal and the South Dakota license plate don’t spark his memory at all.

He trudges away from it and stands out in the road looking back in the direction he came for a few minutes, wondering what to do. He feels out of place here, and he has a feeling like there’s somewhere he’s supposed to be. So he starts walking, out of town, taking route one-ninety-one south. He’s out of condition and doesn’t make good time, but he has a spring in his step because he has a feeling in his gut that he’s headed in the right direction.

A couple of miles out of town a car pulls over, and the driver hails him. He scrunches up his face, feels confused, tells the guy that isn’t his name, his name is Keith. The guy asks where he’s going and Keith tells him,  _Arizona_ , because he has this feeling there’s something important there. And the man gets out, and he’s gazing at Keith like he recognizes him, and his eyes are this odd mix of cautious and overjoyed.

“Do you –  _know_  me?” Keith asks dubiously. “You’re looking at me like you know me. Only I had an accident and I don’t really remember much before that.”

And the man takes a few steps closer, and he’s smiling. “I do know you,” he says, “and Keith isn’t your name.” His eyes are watering. “I’m Samuel Campbell,” he says. “I’ll take you to Arizona if you really want to go there. But I’m hoping you might come with me, because you’re my grandson.”

***

 

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_End_   
**

 


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